KryTane^an  Vocati  ooal     L\bra.'~(-i 


THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


O^,        1^ 


' '00 


VOCATIONAL  SERIES 


THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 


VOCATIONAL  SERIES 

THE  TEACHER  By  Francis  B.  Pearson 

THE  ENGINEER  By  John  Hays  Hammond 

THE  NEWSPAPERMAN  By  Talcott  Williams 

THE  MINISTRY  By  Charles  Lewis  Slattery 

THE  ADVERTISING  MAN 

By  Earnest  Elmo  Calkins 

THE  PHYSICIAN  By  J.  M.  T.  Finney 

CHARLES    SCRIBNER'S    SONS 


VOCATIONAL   SERIES 

THE 
NEWSPAPERMAN 


BY 

TALCOTT  WILLIAMS 

DIRECTOR    OF    SCHOOL    OF    JOURNALISM,    ENDOWED    BY    JOSEPH 
PULITZER,    COLUMBIA    UNIVERSITY,    I9I2-I9I9 
EMERITUS    PROFESSOR    OF     JOURNALISM 


NEW  YORK 

CHARLES   SCRIBNER'S   SONS 

1930 


Copyright,  1922,  by 
CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 


Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America 


^9^ 


TO 

S.    W.    R.    W. 

FOR  A  SPAN  HERSELF  A  WORKING  NEWSPAPER- 
WOMAN, TO  WHOSE  CARE  AND  INSPIRATION  I 
OWE    ALL    I    HAVE    DONE    AS    A   NEWSPAPERMAN 


G78622 


So  thou,  O  son  of  man,  I  have  set  thee 
a  watchman  unto  the  House  of  Israel. 

— ^Ezekiel  33  : 7. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 

I.  The  Choice  of  the  Calling     . 

II.  The  Appointed  Task,  Theory  . 

III.  The  Appointed  Task,  Practice 

IV.  The  Personal  Equipment    . 
V.  Letters  and  the  Newspaper 

VI.  Newspaper  English  . 

VII.  Professional  Training   . 

VIII.  Pay  and  Pecuniary  Reward 

IX.  The    Competition   of    "Public- 


ity 


X.    Differing  Aims  and  Tasks 


PAGE 
I 

19 

45 
69 
81 

93 
114 

145 

177 
1 83 


Index 


205 


THE    NEWSPAPERMAN 


THE  CHOICE  OF  THE  CALLING 

The  man  or  woman  who  turns  for  em- 
ployment or  a  life's  labor  to  the  newspaper 
faces  first  the  conditioning  fact  that  he 
cannot  win  without  a  special  and  particular 
equipment  not  needed  in  other  callings. 
This  is  equally  true  of  all  periodicals,  the 
daily,  the  weekly,  or  the  monthly,  to  journal- 
ism in  any  of  its  five  forms  of  article,  story, 
news,  comment,  and  paid  publicity.  Any 
man  who  has  health,  strength,  physical  and 
mental,  average  ability,  industry,  and  the 
untiring  will,  can  garner  a  fair  harvest  in 
divinity,  law,  medicine,  engineering,  or  busi- 
ness. The  top  may  not  be  his,  but  a  fair, 
commodious  middle  can  be  won  in  which 
and  on  which  he  can  live  in  comfort  all  his 
days  and  leave  a  shapely  tombstone  in  a 
lot,  with  room  for  a  growing  and  surviving 
family. 

Not  so  in  journalism.  For  a  livelihood 
in  this  calling,  a  something,  known  to  the 


2  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

newspaperman,  not  easily  defined  even  by 
him,  is  inexorably  demanded.  A  man  may 
have  all  the  desiderata  just  named  and  be 
able  also  to  write,  and  still  lack  that  one 
thing  needful  which  separates  the  Martha 
of  the  commonplace  life  from  the  Mary  who 
wanted  the  last  news  on  this  world  or  the 
next  and  did  not  care  whether  the  dishes 
of  the  last  meal  were  washed  and  the  food 
of  the  next  meal  cooked. 

The  newspaperman,  the  journalist,  re- 
porter, editor,  critic,  publicity  man,  adver- 
tiser, publisher,  or  whatever  name  is  given 
to  the  calling  the  newsman  pursues  under 
these  various  names  and  titles,  each  and  all 
has  to  remember  that  journalism  is  one  of 
the  arts  of  expression.  An  ill-favored  art 
it  may  be,  but  mine  own,  and  none  the  less 
so,  because  those  who  enter  it  take  that 
which  no  man  else  will.  Being  an  art  and 
not  a  profession,  many  are  called  and  few 
are  chosen. 

There  are  tenfold  more  men  In  the  various 
paths  of  the  engineer  than  seek  the  news- 
paper. Lawyers  are  thrice  as  numerous. 
Fourfold  greater  is  the  number  of  those  who 
practise  medicine  or  stand  in  the  pulpit  than 


CHOICE   OF  THE   CALLING        3 

of  those  who  turn  life  into  copy.  The 
number  is  smaller  than  in  other  recognized 
callings,  and,  outside  of  journalism  itself,  the 
family  council  that  sits  on  the  boy's  future, 
or  a  girl's,  usually  discourages  this  path  as 
dubious,  amorphous — not  as  yet  a  profession 
which  law  or  custom  ranks  with  the  best. 
The  newspaper  family  looks  forw'ard  more 
hopefully  to  this  life  task.  If  it  does  not, 
the  boy  who  has  a  journalist  for  a  father  is 
very  apt  to  tread  in  his  father's  footsteps, 
however  his  father  may  forbid  and  forefend. 
So  of  all  the  arts.  Each  has  a  hazard 
and  a  handicap  not  known  to  any  of  the 
callings  longer  practised,  better  known, 
more  systematically  studied.  Simple  is  the 
reason.  A  profession  has  its  defined  field, 
its  established  preparation,  its  ordered  en- 
trance, regulated  by  statute  or  prescription. 
He  who  enters  it,  follows  rules  and  needs  a 
definite  body  of  knowledge.  If  the  clergy 
faces  no  requirements  established  by  law 
and  enforced  by  opinion  as  well  as  the 
courts,  the  road  to  the  ministry  is  hedged 
on  either  side  by  the  practice,  custom,  prece- 
dent, and  regulation  of  great  religious  com- 
munions whose  action  has  all  the  force  of 


4  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

statutory  provisions.  To  each  of  these 
caUings  there  are  metes  and  bounds. 

JournaHsm  is  an  unfenced  field.  The 
man  who  enters  it  faces  all  the  chances  and 
opportunities  of  the  future  and  the  manifold 
accidents  of  the  arts.  A  man  may  enter  it 
late  in  life,  or,  if  he  enters  it  early,  may  find 
that  success  in  some  other  field,  some  adven- 
ture, achievement,  public  acclaim,  or  the 
sudden  discovery  of  a  special  gift  may  carry 
a  new  man  to  post  or  position  over  the  head 
of  men  laboring  for  years  on  newspaper  or 
periodical.  Less  and  less  do  these  sudden 
entrances  to  the  high  places  of  the  news- 
paperman's calling  prove  successful,  but 
they  remain  and  will  remain  to  the  end  a 
possible  competition  to  be  weighed,  consid- 
ered, and  reckoned  with  in  forecasting  the 
future. 

In  an  art  this  is  inevitable.  The  stage, 
dramatic  and  lyric,  is  perhaps  the  only  hu- 
man calling  in  which  no  man  or  woman  has 
won  a  conspicuous  post  after  forty-five,  very 
infrequently  after  forty,  not  often  after 
thirty,  and  the  greater  figures  have  begun 
before  twenty.  Of  painting,  sculpture,  and 
verse,  it  is  equally  true  that  they  flower  and 


CHOICE   OF  THE   CALLING        5 

fruit  in  adolescence,  and  the  gleanings  of  the 
harvest  never  equal  the  early  reaping.  But 
taking  in  all  the  arts  together,  for  all  those 
in  which  the  technic  of  form  is  the  very 
life-blood,  the  conditioning  factor  of  its  ex- 
istence, as  in  acting,  youth  is  indispensable. 
As  the  arts  diminish  in  technic,  the  vis6 
of  youth  on  the  passport  of  success  is  of  less 
importance.  The  earlier  a  man  enters  a 
newspaper  office  the  better  for  him;  but  the 
open  door  of  achievement  is  open  at  least  to 
thirty,  so  multifarious  are  the  demands  of 
the  newspaper,  so  many  are  the  paths  of 
journalism,  so  wide  is  the  net  of  publicity 
thrown  that  a  win  is  possible  and  has  been 
garnered  in  all  the  decades  of  life. 

This  gives  span  for  delay  and  for  longer 
preparation,  but  it  also  makes  it  more  diffi- 
cult for  the  individual  to  decide,  and  he 
must  decide,  and  none  other,  whether  he 
has  the  special  aptitude  which  the  news- 
paperman needs.  This  is  vitally  necessary. 
A  misfit  is  not  comfortable  in  the  court- 
room, the  church,  or  the  hospital;  but  it  is 
not  as  much  of  a  hell  as  work  in  a  newspaper 
office  to  the  man  who  has  gone  just  far 
enough  to  know  that  he  is  not  fit,  and  too 


6  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

far  easily  to  retrace  his  steps.  Thiers  said 
that  the  newspaper  was  the  best  of  calHngs 
to  the  man  who  left  it  and  used  it  as  a  step- 
ping-stone to  a  career.  The  American  city 
is  thronged  in  all  careers  with  men  who 
learned  life  as  reporters  and  used  its  oppor- 
tunities to  enter  another  calling;  but  the 
years  under  thirty  are  too  precious  for  ex- 
periment. Life  is  no  laboratory,  with  the 
shelves  full  of  reagents  and  open  to  experi- 
ment at  all  hours. 

No  question  is  asked  so  often  by  seekers 
after  advice  on  entering  journalism  as  to 
whether  a  postulant  has  this  special  ability 
needed  by  the  worker  in  the  newspaper  and 
the  applied  literature  of  the  magazine.  No 
one  knows  or  can  tell.  If  your  path  has  led 
you  to  look  over  the  student  work  of  the 
pen,  pencil,  chalk,  and  brush,  or  of  the  mod- 
elling stick,  you  are  perfectly  familiar  with 
the  sudden  stiffening  shock,  akin  to  the  rigid 
pose  of  the  pointer  from  nose  to  tail-tip 
when  he  picks  up  scent,  which  comes  to  you 
when  the  real  thing,  pictile  or  fictile,  strikes 
you.  The  work  of  infant  prodigies  in  draw- 
ing has  gone  past  you  for  weeks,  a  tedious 
procession    of    dwarfed    and    sterile    shoots 


CHOICE   OF   THE   CALLING        7 

born  to  see  no  fruitage,  and  suddenly  you 
rip  open  another  envelope  and,  spread  on 
your  desk,  are  the  uncouth  lines  of  genius. 
Here  is  genius,  though  the  material  may  be 
no  more  than  cats  cut  out  of  white  paper 
en  silhouette.  Cats  front,  ears  up;  cats 
couchant;  cats  stretching  one  leg  out  be- 
hind; cats  with  tails  mast-high  above  two 
ears,  the  wedge-shaped  front,  two  perpen- 
dicular legs,  and  naught  more.  You  know 
you  will  see  the  initials  (C.  D.  G.)  before 
you  in  childish  print  through  a  long  future. 
So  in  the  early  work  of  the  first  semester  of 
an  art  school  you  look  vacantly  over  the 
array  of  casts  misdrawn  and  shading  mur- 
dered, and  with  a  start  you  see  one  drawing 
that  has  what  you  could  neither  describe  nor 
define  but  know  an  original  artist  is  before 
you.  It  was  thus  on  a  wailful  of  sketches 
of  Market  Street,  Philadelphia,  on  a  rainy 
day,  that  I  first  saw  the  work  of  Robert 
Henri. 

But  this  is  not  possible,  nor  is  it  the  privi- 
lege of  the  man  who  is  trying  to  see  in  a 
youth,  shy  or  de-shyed,  the  possible  reporter 
of  the  future.  The  call  of  the  cub  of  the 
newspaper  jungle   is   not  so  immediate  as 


8  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

that  of  the  artist.  It  is  often  wholly  unrec- 
ognizable. This  is  because  the  cry  of  the 
pack  is  not  so  definite,  so  idiosyncratic. 
The  capacity  to  write  is  a  mere  tool  to  the 
newspaperman.  He  may  write  very  ill  and 
still  be  a  superb  newspaperman.  Every 
journalist  of  experience  has  known  men  who 
could  not  compose  and  only  wrote  halting, 
monosyllabic,  mechanical  sentences,  who 
were  excellent  reporters.  This  is  so  far  rec- 
ognized that  the  last  differentiation  in  news- 
paper work  in  large  cities  is  the  division  of 
the  staff  between  the  reporter  who  goes  out, 
gets  the  facts,  and  telephones  his  summary 
to  the  "write-up"  man,  who  proceeds  to 
clothe  the  bare  bones  of  the  searcher  with 
the  garniture  of  style,  sentiment,  and  "hu- 
man interest."  This  decreases  accuracy 
and,  ordinarily,  increases  the  interest  of  the 
reader.  At  least  this  is  assumed,  but  there 
are  enough  newspapers  with  large  circula- 
tions and  large  profits  who  will  none  of  this 
inevitable  inaccuracy,  to  show  that  the 
reader  does  not  always  prefer  varnished 
truth.  This  subdivision  of  labors  is  almost 
precisely  similar  to  the  respective  tasks  of 
solicitor  and  barrister  in  an  English  civil 


CHOICE  OF  THE   CALLING       9 

suit.  The  facts  are  all  gathered  by  the 
solicitor  and  most  of  the  law.  The  local 
color,  if  I  may  use  this  term  of  the  august 
process  of  an  English  court,  is  freely  applied 
by  the  bewigged  barrister.  The  American 
lawyer  would  not  accept  this  for  an  instant, 
though  every  one  with  a  wide  acquaintance 
at  the  bar  knows  many  firms  whose  strength 
lies  in  this  division  of  legal  roles  between  its 
members.  On  the  other  hand,  the  English 
newspaper  would  not,  for  an  instant,  accept 
the  "write-up"  man,  and  presents  its  local 
news  close  written  to  a  mechanic  mould. 
The  American  wants  form  in  his  newspaper 
as  in  life  and  so  much  else  of  his  days,  and 
in  his  buildings. 

This  runs  through  the  whole  field  of  the 
American  newspaper,  and  is  a  national  bent. 
A  dramatic  criticism  must  first  of  all  be 
good  reading,  and  some  critics  schooled  in 
this  path  unconsciously  sacrifice  accuracy  to 
epigram,  and  the  merits  of  a  presentation  to 
a  taking  description.  Politics,  finance,  offi- 
cial acts,  and  the  entire  round  of  serious  re- 
ports catch  the  same  habit  because,  in  spite 
of  the  great  and  frequent  success  of  sober 
accuracy,  those  who  are  seeking  circulation 


10  THE  NEWSPAPERMAN 

are  always  tempted  to  a  primrose  path  of 
dalliance  with  veredicity,  instead  of  win- 
ning that  shyest  of  all  damsels,  the  truth, 
the  whole  truth,  and  nothing  but  the  truth. 

Yet  a  publisher  whose  utmost  stretch  of 
written  utterance  is  the  business  letter, 
"Yours  of  loth  Inst,  rec'd  and  contents 
noted.  Would  say  in  answer,"  and  so  on, 
comes  not  infrequently  to  be  recognized  and 
accepted  by  an  entire  newspaper  ofhce  as 
having  the  best  nose  for  news,  the  best  eye 
for  heads,  and  the  best  choice  for  first-page 
"stories"  of  any  man  in  the  building.  A 
newspaper  owner  in  a  big  city  has  this  gift, 
and  none  other  of  the  usual  head  furniture 
of  the  newspaperman;  but  this  is  enough 
to  explain  his  position  and  assure  his  suc- 
cess. 

From  these  various  angles  there  gradually 
emerges  what  the  newspaper  demands  as 
inexorable,  indispensable  newspaper  work 
from  the  man  or  woman  who  seeks  it. 
Knowledge  is  needed.  Nothing  a  newspaper- 
man knows  but  is  useful  to  him.  However 
strange,  however  distant,  however  far-flung 
the  information  may  be,  the  hour  is  sure  to 
strike   when   that   group   of   facts   will   be 


CHOICE  OF  THE  CALLING      ii 

wanted  In  order  to  gather,  to  express,  to 
edit,  to  present  or  to  comment  upon  the 
news  of  the  hour.  Writing  is  most  desir- 
able, though  not  indispensable,  but  a  man's 
path  is  smoothed,  his  chances  are  improved, 
his  future  is  assured  if  he  has  the  supreme 
and  precious  gift  of  style.  It  may  be  lim- 
pid, effective,  arousing,  inspiring,  appealing, 
picturesque,  persuasive,  elevated,  humor- 
ous, any  or  all  these.  Each  has  its  place  in 
the  newspaper.  No  labor  is  too  great  and 
no  toil  misplaced  which  secures  this.  Most 
precious  of  all  in  the  newspaper  is  a  style 
qua  style,  like  that  of  Defoe,  Franklin,  Cob- 
bett,  Dana,  or  Brisbane — nervous,  close- 
written,  iterant,  corrosive.  But  a  news- 
paper career  may  be  won  without  style. 

The  essence  of  the  newspaper  is  that  it 
attracts,  gathers,  and  keeps  its  audience,  its 
circulation.  So  of  any  periodical.  At  this 
point,  and  this  alone,  it  stands  apart  from  all 
else  in  the  year's  flood  of  the  printed  word. 
The  newspaperman,  to  secure  this  circula- 
tion, must  have  two  capacities  strongly  de- 
veloped. He  must  have  an  instinct,  an  in- 
stinctive power  in  divining  and  discerning 
the  relative  public  interest  in  each  event  as 


12  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

it  comes.  He  must  feel,  next,  this  inci- 
dence and  value  as  to  country,  state,  city, 
and,  most  precious  and  important  of  all, 
upon  the  circulation  area. 

This  capacity  has  behind  it  a  vivid  inter- 
est in  the  moving  show  of  life,  the  round 
world  as  it  turns  and  all  that  passes  with  it. 
For  high  success  there  must  be  joined  a 
flaming  desire  to  advance  and  improve. 
The  first  is  necessary;  the  second  inspires 
and  directs  news  to  the  definite  end  of 
awakening  a  demand  for  reform  and  im- 
provement. Curiosity  this  is  not.  The 
good  newspaperman  is  never  curious.  Paul 
Pry  has  no  place  in  a  good  newspaper  office. 
Nothing  so  numbs  personal  curiosity  as 
newspaper  experience.  There  is  no  news- 
paperman in  the  crowd  that  flocks  around 
a  fallen  horse  or  a  smashed  taxicab.  He 
knows  that  the  event  will  have  its  due  record 
and  run  its  due  course  to  the  newspaper 
office,  without  casual  aid  or  accidental  as- 
sistance. For  myself— and  I  have  ques- 
tioned scores  of  newspapermen — only  once 
did  "news"  cross  my  path  in  the  making, 
when  a  pistol-shot,  as  I  walked  home  at  i 
A.  M.,   brought  me  bounding  up  the  steps 


CHOICE   OF   THE   CALLING      13 

of  a  house  whose  door  was  opened  by  a 
scared  maid,  with  murder  attempted  in  the 
story  above. 

A  great  concourse  of  news,  an  active  news- 
paperman, who  remains  a  reporter  to  the 
end  of  his  days  will  gather,  not  because  he 
himself  sees  it,  but  because  any  of  a  hundred 
hints  uncovers  the  possibility  of  "news." 
This  is  not  curiosity.  It  is  not  an  appetite 
for  events  as  such.  Most  that  happens  is 
not  news. 

"If  a  dog  bites  a  man,"  said  Charles  A. 
Dana,  "that  is  not  news.  Every  one  knows 
that  dogs  bite  men.  But  if  a  man  bites  a 
dog,  that  is  news."  More  than  the  percep- 
tion and  discovery  of  the  unusual  is  needed 
to  make  real  news.  Some  social  relation 
must  exist.  "Visualize,"  said  one  teaching 
journalism  to  a  neophyte,  "the  long  porch 
of  a  summer  hotel  on  the  beach.  You  can 
see  It.  Endless  piazza,  windows  every  so 
often  opening  Into  rooms,  hanging  screens 
without.  If  a  screen  was  caught  and  en- 
tangled, would  you  stop  and  straighten  It 
or  would  you  go  to  the  office  and  ask  them 
to  send  some  one?"  The  boy  with  the 
newspaper  instinct  will  straighten  the  en- 


14  THE  NEWSPAPERMAN 

tangled  screen.  The  boy  who  goes  to  the 
office,  no  matter  how  well  he  writes,  is  not 
a  newspaper  man,  and  will  not  be,  until  he 
has  unlearned  this  attitude,  and  has  an  in- 
stant desire  when  something  hangs  crooked 
to  straighten  it  at  once. 

This  is  a  complex  of  many  causes  within. 
The  social  structure  must  mean  much  to 
him.  It  was  the  one  nation  most  successful 
in  self-reverence,  self-knowledge,  self-con- 
trol, and  self-government  which  gave  the 
world  Shakespeare,  the  one  poet  and  dra- 
matist to  whom  all  the  ways  and  words, 
the  wandering  and  wondering  of  men  were 
known.  Not  for  him  Achilles  and  Ulysses, 
not  for  him  Agamemnon  and  the  Mycenean 
line,  the  hero  of  Rome's  beginning,  or  Hell, 
Purgatory,  or  Heaven,  but  the  whole  struc- 
ture of  human  life,  its  warp  and  its  woof, 
all  that  live  and  move  and  have  their  being, 
and  all  that  men  do  and  desire  are  in  the  one 
thousand  characters  of  the  English  poet. 
He  began  with  kings  and  the  pageant  of 
history,  but  as  his  plays  grow  they  gather 
a  larger  and  more  complete  array  of  all  who 
are  in  the  earth  of  man  and  his  imaginings. 

The  race  that  produced  him,  the  institu- 


CHOICE  OF  THE   CALLING      15 

tions  which  he  saw  in  the  very  moment  of 
transition  to  the  rule  of  the  many,  the 
composite  tongue  he  used  so  freely  that  the 
total  of  his  diction  equals  the  number  of 
separate  words  used  by  Homer  and  Virgil 
together,  this  people  in  its  various  homes 
and  this  tongue  have  the  overwhelming 
share  of  the  world's  newspaper  circulation, 
as  nearly  as  one  can  make  out,  about  eighty 
per  cent  furnished  by  a  tenth  of  the  world's 
population. 

These  things  are  not  matters  of  accident. 
They  are  not  adventitious.  The  supreme 
figure  in  the  letters  of  English-speaking  folk 
reflects  the  same  universal  interest  in  all  of 
humanity  as  does  the  newspaper  in  English. 
The  journalist  of  Continental  Europe  pri- 
marily seeks  to  express  himself.  The  jour- 
nalism of  London  seeks  to  express  the  life 
of  which  it  is  a  part.  Few  names  of  its 
writers  become  known  as  compared  with 
those  whose  names  are  known  in  Paris,  Ber- 
lin, and  Rome.  Take  the  newspapers  of 
New  York  and  our  other  great  cities,  and 
each  expresses  its  environment  more  closely 
than  newspapers  in  foreign  cities.  They 
print  more  local  news  per  hundred  columns 


i6  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

of  print.  They  give  local  news  a  more  con- 
spicuous place.  Local  expression,  a  keen 
sense  of  the  organism  whose  flow  and  ac- 
tion they  record,  an  avowed  purpose  to 
improve  and  advance  its  administration,  its 
growth,  its  prosperity — to  boom  it,  this  is 
the  evident  avowed  end  and  being  of  the 
American  city  paper.  Whoever  knew  an 
English  paper  avowedly  "booming"  its 
city?  Its  stafif  would  not  recognize  the 
word  coming  down  the  pike. 

This  dyes  American  journalism  and,  like 
madder  stalks  fed  to  cattle,  the  very  bones 
of  the  American  journalist  must  be  red  with 
this  spirit. 

This  zeal  for  the  advance,  this  deep-rooted 
desire  to  see  all  schools,  streets,  homes, 
trade,  politics  grow  better,  burns  Uke  a 
flame,  consuming  and  unconsumed,  in  the 
soul  of  the  American  journalist.  Its  WDrse 
side  is  local  gossip,  casual  events,  fruitless 
exposures,  but  the  noble  aspects  are  appar- 
ent in  the  scores  and  scores  of  journalists 
we  have  all  known  who  give  their  lives  to 
reforms,  their  days  and  nights  to  making 
transparent  the  vast  life  of  the  cities  in 
which  they  live,  and  into  whose  life  they 
build  themselves. 


CHOICE  OF  THE   CALLING      17 

This  is  not  universal,  but  it  is  omni- 
present. It  enters  into  every  newspaper;  it 
is  present  in  every  city  room;  it  glows  in 
every  editorial  page.  Not  even  the  stifling 
flood  and  the  dead-weight  of  7,000,000  of 
population  gathered  from  all  the  earth  can 
prevent  every  daily  in  New  York  City  from 
speaking  as  the  guardian  of  the  city,  re- 
gretting its  ills  and  its  failures,  its  corrup- 
tion and  its  iniquity,  rejoicing  in  its  reforms 
and  advance,  in  season  and  out  of  season, 
revealing  the  life  and  the  soul  of  the  city. 

If  a  young  man  and  a  young  woman  at 
the  threshold  of  this  great  calling  glow  with 
this  devotion,  if  the  great  tides  of  a  city 
move  them  and  for  them  earth  knows 
naught  more  fair,  they  are  chosen  for  the 
calling  and  share  its  thrills  and  its  deeper 
throb.  By  this  sign  shall  they  know  their 
call:  "The  zeal  of  thy  house  hath  eaten  me 
up."  This  enthusiasm  will  take  many  forms 
and  shapes  and  be  present  in  many  simili- 
tudes, the  city  as  a  whole,  its  administration, 
its  education,  its  health,  its  housing,  its  self- 
government,  its  purity,  its  beauty,  its  wealth 
and  its  commerce,  its  traffic  by  sea  and  by 
land,  the  surging  values  of  business  and  ex- 


i8  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

change.  Any  one  of  these  may  absorb  a 
Hfetime.  Every  daily  and  every  weekly 
journaHst  who  does  me  the  honor  to  read 
these  Hnes  knows  full  well  that  I  have  laid 
bare  the  secrets  of  his  heart,  conscious  or 
hitherto  unconscious,  and  set  in  ordered 
array  the  cherished  purpose  of  his  soul  for 
city,  county,  village,  town,  state,  country. 
This  is  the  call  of  the  pack;  happy  the  cub 
who  hears  it,  and  hearing,  follows. 


II 

THE  APPOINTED  TASK,  THEORY* 

This  underlying  purpose  of  American 
journalism  colors  alike  Its  preparation,  Its 
training,  and  Its  mission.  In  Individual 
newspapermen  the  urge  to  the  general  ser- 
vice varies,  as  does  all,  good  and  bad,  In  the 
illimitable  mosaic  of  human  character  and 
the  crowd.  For  myself,  I  have  never  known 
a  working  journalist  who  had  not  some 
share  of  it.  Large,  small,  smaller,  smallest, 
the  urge  was  there.  The  newspaper  always 
professes  and  protests  its  desire  to  serve  the 

*  This  chapter  was  the  opening  lecture  of  my  course  in 
the  "History  of  Journalism,"  delivered  when  the  School 
of  Journalism  in  Columbia  University  began  its  first  ses- 
sion in  October,  1912.  For  forty  years  I  had  been  an 
active  journalist  in  many  fields — reporter,  Albany  corre- 
spondent, news  editor,  Washington  correspondent,  man- 
aging editor,  critic  in  literature  and  art,  editorial  writer, 
and  on  my  appointment  as  director  of  the  school  I  found 
myself,  in  my  new  post,  called  to  give  the  faith  and  creed 
that  was  in  me  for  use  in  teaching  the  calling  1  had  prac- 
tised all  my  active  life.  After  years  of  study  and  obser- 
vation of  a  profession  to  which  I  had  given  all  I  was,  I 
present  this,  nine  years  later,  as  still,  for  me,  the  interpre- 
tation of  the  journalist's  work. 

19 


20  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

community.  Hypocrisy?  Sometimes.  All 
hypocrisy  is,  at  bottom,  a  recognition  of 
accepted  standards.  The  work  of  the  news- 
paper is  always  for  the  mass.  Profit-mak- 
ing it  may  be,  but  the  accepted  and  asserted 
purpose  is  the  benefit  of  the  community  by 
giving  it  what  the  mass  needs  to  know,  and 
knowing,  knows  itself. 

This  is  the  difference  between  literature 
and  journalism.  Literature  is  the  voice  of 
the  individual  as  to  what  might  be  or  su- 
pernally  is;  the  newspaper  Is  uttering  to  the 
many  what  the  few  and  the  many  do  in 
their  relation  and  reference  to  the  mass. 
This  is  the  reason  for  the  recognition  and 
acceptance  by  the  common  law,  as  uttered 
by  courts  through  centuries,  that  publica- 
tion of  certain  evil  conduct,  on  the  border 
between  law  and  morals,  is  lawful  and  justi- 
fiable when  said  of  a  man  running  for  office, 
or  holding  it  as  a  public  trust;  but  subject  to 
damages,  if  said  of  a  private  person  whose 
personal  life  has  no  public  relation.  The 
mere  fact  that  a  special  Incident  has  taken 
place  Is  not,  the  law  holds,  sufficient  ground 
for  publication,  if  it  be  injurious  to  an  indi- 
vidual,  unless  some   public  end   is  served. 


THEORY  21 

The  area  and  definition  of  a  public  end 
steadily  widens  and  finally  will  include  any 
misdeed.  Even  then,  publication  will  have 
for  its  justification  public  use  rather  than 
private  ends.  The  individual  entering  the 
calling  needs  to  understand  that  the  prime 
end  and  office  of  journalism  is  not  for  per- 
sonal expression,  but  the  use  of  one's  capa- 
city, power,  and  will  to  express  the  tide  of 
events  for  public  ends  and  advance. 

Literature  and  journalism  use  the  same 
weapon,  writing.  They  occupy  much  the 
same  battle-field.  Confused  thinking  and 
confused  comparison  are  inevitable.  No  one 
can  clearly  draw  the  line  between  them. 
There  is  much  literature,  and  some  very 
good  literature — in  journalism.  There  is 
much  journalism,  and  some  very  bad  jour- 
nalism, in  literature.  In  dealing  with  litera- 
ture, it  is  on  the  whole  a  misfortune  that, 
under  modern  democratic  conditions,  so 
much  stress  is  laid  by  publisher  and  author 
upon  the  audience.  In  journalism  it  is  a 
constant  obstacle  and  discouragement  that 
the  journalist  is  judged  from  the  standpoint 
of  the  author.  Authorship  has  almost  noth- 
ing to  do  with  journalism  and  journalism 


22  THE  NEWSPAPERMAN 

has  almost  nothing  to  do  with  authorship, 
though  there  have  been  great  authors  who 
were  journaHsts  and  journahsts  who  would 
have  been  great  authors  if  they  had  not 
sought  the  higher  and  more  difficult  task  of 
journaHsm.     The  man  who  writes  a  book 
which  is  read  once  by  a  thousand  people  for 
each  of  a  hundred  years  is  an  author  and  an 
author  who  has  won  most  unusual  success. 
The  journalist  who  writes  an  article  or  a 
series  of  articles  of  the  dimensions  of  a  book, 
read   by  a  hundred  thousand   people,   has 
exactly   the  same   number  of  readers,   has 
affected  the  same  number  of  human  beings, 
and  has  had,  as  far  as  statistics  go,  to  coin 
a  phrase   from  railroad   reports,   the  same 
number  of   "reading  years"  to  his  credit. 
Numerically  they  have  had   the  same  re- 
sponse   from    the    reader.     Practically    we 
know    that    they   occupy   an    entirely   dif- 
ferent position  in  the  world  of  letters  and 
in  the  world  of  human  values.     The  man 
who  has  written  a  book  that  survives  a  cen- 
tury, to  have  its  thousand  of  readers  each 
year,  has  expressed  himself.     The  journalist 
who  has  succeeded  in  his  task  and  is  read 
in  a  succession  of  a  hundred  days  by  a  hun- 


THEORY  23 

dred  thousand  readers,  has  expressed  the 
community.  The  book  and  its  author  were 
important  from  their  individual  weight. 
The  journaHst  was  important  because  he 
served  and  expressed  a  pubHc  need  and  had 
the  precise  abihty,  aptitude,  and  opportun- 
ity to  do  so.  The  book  that  is  worth  read- 
ing, independent  of  its  author  and  his  day, 
exists  apart.  The  newspaper  article  exists 
as  a  part  of  a  social  system.  Shortly  after 
Aristotle  died,  those  to  whom  the  whole 
body  of  his  work  came,  buried  it.  It  was 
lost  to  the  world  for  187  years.  When  these 
works  were  discovered,  bought  by  a  wealthy 
book  collector,  and  taken  to  Rome,  Aristotle 
was  none  the  less  "the  master  of  all  who 
know."  We  are  scarcely  aware  to-day  that 
there  was  in  his  amazing  influence  an  inter- 
ruption of  nigh  200  years,  in  which  a  soli- 
tary tomb  in  Pergamos  held  what  was  to 
change  the  currents  of  thought  for  all  the 
world  as  streams  of  water  over  the  irrigated 
field  are  turned  by  the  husbandman's  foot. 
A  newspaper  buried  187  years,  immediately 
after  publication,  would  be  worthless  even 
as  a  curiosity,  if  the  edition  were  great 
enough  to  make  the  number  surviving  large. 


24  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

Aristotle  could  wait;  the  newspaper  can- 
not. It  must  speak.  It  must  speak  at 
dawn  or  at  eventide,  or  it  is  wasted.  This 
is  because  its  value  rests  not  merely  upon 
what  it  contains,  but  upon  the  relation  which 
that  value  bears  to  the  society  of  which  it 
is  a  part.  It  serves  that  society  and  is 
served  by  it.  The  instant  it  is  detached 
from  that  society,  it  ceases  to  live.  Its  life 
is  large  in  exact  proportion  as  its  contact 
and  interpenetration  of  the  social  structure 
is  complete.  Its  news  has  its  importance, 
not  because  of  the  thing  that  has  happened, 
though  this  is  or  should  be  indispensable  to 
publication,  but  because  it  is  read  by  half 
a  million  people.  The  awing  fact  in  a  news- 
paper head -line  is  not  simply  the  news  that 
it  tells,  but  the  consciousness  that  every  one 
else  is  learning  the  same  thing  at  the  same 
time.  It  is  this  organized,  constant,  iter- 
ant and  continuous  publicity  that  makes 
the  difference  between  the  publicity  of  a 
newspaper,  even  though  its  circulation  be 
small,  and  the  publicity  of  a  private  letter, 
a  difference  in  kind,  not  only  in  degree.  The 
reason  why  the  publication  of  any  wrong- 
doing in  a  newspaper  is  dreaded  is  not  be- 


THEORY  25 

cause  the  wrong-doing  has  happened  and  is 
told — every  wrong-doing  is  told  to  some  one 
the  instant  it  is  done  and  told  to  more  and 
more  as  circumstances  regulate — but  the 
newspaper,  by  making  the  fact  a  part  of  the 
common  consciousness  of  society,  has  in- 
stantly changed  the  character  of  the  pub- 
licity, given  it  weight,  importance  and  con- 
sequence, as  one  of  the  factors  that  must  de- 
cide the  public  will  and  often,  in  fact,  does 
set  in  motion  the  wheels  of  justice.  Many 
may  have  known  what  the  newspaper  pub- 
lishes, but  the  instant  it  is  published  the 
whole  machinery  of  justice  is  forced  to 
move,  and  a  reluctant  district  attorney,  an 
inert  grand  jury,  a  hesitating  judge,  and  a 
petit  jury,  each  of  whose  members,  indi- 
vidually, would  be  willing  to  let  this  matter 
pass,  are  forced  to  action. 

It  is  the  character  of  this  responsibility 
that  settles  the  attitude  and  utterance  of 
the  man  who  writes  on  the  newspaper, 
whether  he  is  writing  news  or  opinion  or 
that  large  share  of  the  newspaper  which  is 
a  blend  of  both,  fact  used  to  create  opinion 
and  opinion  used  to  interpret  fact.  The 
great  and  original  genius  is  not  attracted  to 


26  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

the  newspaper,  shuns  it  rather,  because  he 
feels  that  the  Hnks  that  unite  the  newspaper 
to  the  structure  of  society  are  also  chains 
that  bind. 

Knowing  that  I  was  to  meet  Robert 
Browning  on  a  trip  to  England,  the  pub- 
lisher of  a  prominent  magazine,  Mr.  S.  S. 
McClure,  charged  me  with  a  commission  to 
obtain  a  poem  from  him  for  publication  and 
left  the  price  open  up  to  a  thousand  dollars, 
even  if  the  poem  were  only  four  or  eight 
lines  long,  and  even  if  it  were  a  poem  not 
recently  written,  so  that  it  had  never  been 
published.  Robert  Browning,  I  learned 
then  for  the  first  time,  had  never  appeared 
in  a  periodical  during  all  of  his  life  as  a  man 
of  letters.  I  met  him  in  London  in  the 
year  that  had  just  passed,  the  fifty-sixth 
anniversary  of  '  Pauline.'  Meeting  the  poet 
as  I  did,  it  was  out  of  the  question  to 
do  anything  either  so  impertinent  or  so 
banal  as  to  make  any  offer  to  him.  But 
conversation  and  the  continuous  talk  of 
two  hours  eddies  in  many  channels,  and  if 
one  has  long  been  an  interviewer,  familiar 
with  the  task  of  securing  the  interview,  it 
is  easy  to  guide  almost  any  man  to  any 
subject  on  which  you  desire  to  secure  an 


THEORY  27 

opinion.  In  this  the  interviewer  is  like  a 
cross-examiner  and  exercises  an  art  whose 
highest  art  is  the  concealment  of  its  purpose. 

At  last,  the  poet  was  saying,  "  I  have 
never  appeared  in  the  pages  of  a  maga- 
zine. I  have  never  contributed  an  article. 
I  could  not.  A  man  who  takes  in" — using 
the  English  phrase  which  in  America  we 
call  "subscribe" — "anything,  newspaper, 
weekly,  monthly,  does  it  under  the  tacit 
agreement  that  it  will  follow  a  certain 
course.  This  monthly,"  and  Browning  took 
up  a  magazine  which  lay  on  the  table  and 
held  it  in  his  hand,  poised,  "enters  a  man's 
house  once  a  month.  It  is  understood  that 
certain  things  shall  not  appea^  in  it  and  that 
certain  things  shall.  Every  editor  knows 
this.  He  would  break  this  tacit  promise  if 
he  did  not  meet  the  expectation  of  his  sub- 
scribers. As  for  me,"  and  the  poet  settled 
back  in  his  chair,  with  the  magazine  still 
in  his  hand,  "I  cannot  write  that  way.  I 
say  what  I  have  to  say.  I  have  it  printed 
in  a  book.  Take  it  or  leave  it."  And  the 
magazine  was  impulsively  flung  upon  the 
table.     "It  is  no  concern  of  mine." 

So  far  was  this  true,  he  went  on  to  say, 
that   down    to    'The    Ring  and  the  Book' 


28  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

everything  that  he  had  pubHshed  had  cost 
him  a  printer's  bill.  He  had  printed  it  at 
his  own  expense  because  he  wanted  it 
printed  and  not  enough  people  wanted  to 
read  it  to  pay  the  printer's  bills.  "I  have 
been  fortunate,"  he  said,  "in  being  able  to 
do  this.  I  have  always  had  the  means  to 
print.  I  feel  humble  when  I  remember 
men  like  Lamb  who  have  gone  on  writing  in 
illness  and  without  means." 

There  spoke  the  poet  and  genius,  certainly 
one  of  the  foremost  if  not  the  foremost  of 
the  men  of  the  nineteenth  century,  that  age 
of  an  amazing  expansion  of  the  newspaper. 
But  if  you  will  turn  to  its  higher  literature, 
from  Coleridge  and  Wordsworth  at  its  open- 
ing to  Tennyson  so  near  its  close,  you  will 
find  through  the  whole  round  scarcely  a  ref- 
erence to  the  newspaper,  no  discussion  of  it 
save  an  occasional  scoff  or  protest,  no  rec- 
ognition of  its  value,  of  its  work,  nor  of  its 
importance — genius  uttering  its  own  voice, 
finding  for  its  own  work  no  proper  place 
in  a  power  which  has  wrought  marvellous 
things  in  the  past  hundred  years.*     George 

*  Tennyson  has  five  references  to  the  "press,"  Browning 
two  to  the  "newspaper,"  Wordsworth  none.  Coleridge,  a 
leader  writer,  has  as  little. 


THEORY  29 

Crabbe  is  almost  alone  among  poets  in 
making  it  the  subject  of  a  poem. 

This  is  because  of  the  necessary  limi- 
tations of  a  newspaper.  It  began  in  the 
pamphlet  and  the  news  letter,  individual 
enterprises  for  which  the  individual  alone 
was  responsible,  though  the  luckless  printer 
— generally  the  one  of  the  two  with  re- 
sponsible means — and  not  the  author,  was 
usually  sued  for  libel.  This  grew  into  the 
essay,  of  which  The  Spectator  is  the  familiar 
example,  for  which  there  was  a  regular  sub- 
scription. Instantly  there  began  that  sense 
of  responsibility  to  the  recurrent  reader. 
This  increased  with  every  step  of  the  past 
two  centuries.  As  circulation  has  increased, 
as  advertising  has  grown,  as  the  Interlocking 
of  the  newspaper  with  the  vast  machine  of 
society  grew  more  close,  it  steadily  moved 
away  from  the  mere  individual  utterance  to 
its  organic  and  necessary  duty  of  serving  the 
public  as  it  gradually  recorded  its  facts  and 
reverberated  its  opinions,  by  uttering  them, 
sometimes  creating  what  it  anticipates,  and 
sometimes  anticipating  what  It  creates. 

This  circumstance  profoundly  changes  the 
work,  the  position,  the  responsibility,  and 
the  ethics  both  of  the  newspaper  and  of  the 


30  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

journalist.  At  no  one  point  will  it  ever  be 
completely  true  that  there  is  no  individual 
initiative  in  the  newspaper,  and  at  no  one 
point  will  it  ever  be  true,  however  anxious 
the  newspaper  is  to  subordinate  individual 
initiative,  that  the  newspaper  manages  either 
to  record  with  perfect  precision  the  facts 
with  which  it  deals,  or  to  express  with  cer- 
tainty the  opinion  of  those  who,  to  use 
Browning's  phrase,  "take  it  in."  But  there 
will  always  be  a  steadily  increasing  approxi- 
mation to  this  end  and  idea,  an  approxima- 
tion partly  conscious  and  pecuniary  on  the 
part  of  the  business  half  of  the  newspaper, 
partly  unconscious  and  professional  on  the 
part  of  the  writing  side.  The  newspaper 
which  began  as  a  voice  crying  in  the  wilder- 
ness and  finding  in  the  meagre  satisfaction 
of  that  day  very  little  but  locusts  and  wild 
honey  on  which  to  live,  the  coarsest  gar- 
ments to  wear,  the  garret  for  a  habitation, 
and  the  pillory  for  a  reward,  has  inevitably 
passed  into  a  fiduciary  relation,  such  as 
Robert  Browning,  so  far  as  I  know,  was  the 
first  accurately  to  see  and  describe  and  to 
refuse  to  accept,  so  far  as  his  own  work  was 
concerned. 


THEORY  31 

This  fiduciary  relation  carries  with  it  the 
obligation  of  service  and  the  consciousness 
of  a  great  public  duty  on  the  part  of  the 
journalist.  It  is  never  true  of  him,  as  is 
sometimes  unkindly  said,  that,  like  the 
drum-major,  he  leads  the  procession  along  a 
predetermined  route,  from  which  he  cannot 
vary,  and  that  the  apparently  spontaneous 
twirls  of  his  baton  and  surprising  gyrations 
of  his  wand  of  ofifice  really  follow  a  pre- 
scribed tune  which  is  already  written,  as  he 
walks  before  those  who  pipe  and  drum  it, 
from  the  thundering  bass  of  the  great  news- 
paper to  the  flageolet  of  the  country  weekly 
piping  on  its  rural  reed.  But  it  is  true  that 
the  instant  the  journalist  turns  into  a  side 
street  and  the  procession  leaves  him  and 
goes  its  own  way,  as  has  happened  to  many 
an  independent  journalist,  he  ceases  to  be  a 
journalist  and  becomes  that  admirable  but 
costly  person,  to  himself  and  to  his  pub- 
lisher, the  pamphleteer,  who,  as  Robert 
Browning  admirably  preferred  to  do,  pays 
the  price  of  printing,  careless  whether  men 
take  it  or  leave  it.  A  journalist  cannot  be 
careless  at  this  point.  If  men  leave  his 
newspaper  he  may  be  publishing  a  most  ad- 


32  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

mirable  history  of  the  world  for  a  day 
freighted  with  the  wisest  opinion  ever  ut- 
tered, but  the  publication  is  not  a  newspaper. 
It  is,  instead,  a  book  published  daily  by  its 
author  and  creator  at  an  extravagant  cost, 
in  a  form  which  renders  its  preservation  im- 
possible, its  present  penally  costly,  and  its 
future  a  safe  oblivion. 

The  whole  struggle  and  contest  over  the 
office  and  function  of  a  newspaper  is  all  ulti- 
mately based  on  the  circumstance  already 
carefully  noted,  that  this  whole  change, 
alteration,  and  evolution — in  a  sense  of  all 
periodicals,  but  particularly  of  the  daily 
paper — from  being  the  work  of  one  man  to 
becoming  the  expression  of  society  is  always 
in  process  of  being  carried  on.  It  is  never 
complete.  The  work  of  the  newspaper  is 
never  exclusively  one  thing  or  the  other. 
It  is  a  blend  of  both.  There  will  always 
remain  the  personal  and  moral  responsi- 
bility of  the  journalist.  He  can  no  more 
divest  himself  of  it  than  can  the  judge  of 
responsibility  for  an  execution.  His  very 
fiduciary  capacity  and  his  service  of  the 
people  only  increase  this  responsibility. 
Says    Ezekiel    (33:1-9),    on    the   whole,    I 


THEORY  33 

think,  the  most  original  thinker  that  social 
morals  have  known,  so  large  a  share  of  new 
truth  is  contained  in  him: 

1.  Again  the  word  of  the  Lord  came  unto 
me,  saying, 

2.  Son  of  man,  speak  to  the  children  of  thy 
people,  and  say  unto  them.  When  I  bring  the 
sword  upon  a  land,  if  the  people  of  the  land 
take  a  man  of  their  coasts,  and  set  him  for 
their  watchman: 

3.  If  when  he  seeth  the  sword  come  upon  the 
land,  he  blow  the  trumpet,  and  warn  the  people; 

4.  Then  whosoever  heareth  the  sound  of  the 
trumpet,  and  taketh  not  warning;  if  the  sword 
come,  and  take  him  away,  his  blood  shall  be 
upon  his  own  head. 

5.  He  heard  the  sound  of  the  trumpet,  and 
took  not  warning;  his  blood  shall  be  upon  him. 
But  he  that  taketh  warning  shall  deliver  his 
soul. 

6.  But  if  the  watchman  see  the  sword  come, 
and  blow  not  the  trumpet,  and  the  people  be 
not  warned;  if  the  sword  come,  and  take  any 
person  from  among  them,  he  is  taken  away  in 
his  iniquity;  but  his  blood  will  I  require  at  the 
watchman's  hand. 

7.  So  thou,  O  son  of  man,  I  have  set  thee  a 
watchman  unto  the  house  of  Israel;  therefore 


34  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

thou  shalt  hear  the  word  at  my  mouth,  and 
warn  them  from  me. 

8.  When  I  say  unto  the  wicked,  O  wicked 
man,  thou  shalt  surely  die;  if  thou  dost  not 
speak  to  warn  the  wicked  from  his  way,  that 
wicked  man  shall  die  in  his  iniquity;  but  his 
blood  will  I  require  at  thine  hand. 

9.  Nevertheless,  if  thou  warn  the  wicked  of 
his  way  to  turn  from  it;  if  he  do  not  turn  from 
his  way,  he  shall  die  in  his  iniquity;  but  thou 
hast  delivered  thy  soul. 

These  are  the  marching  orders  of  the 
journalist.  I  am  fain  to  admit  that  when  I 
once  sent  them  to  an  extremely  clever  and 
penetrating  woman  who  had  scoffed  at  my 
calling,  she  responded  that  they  might  be 
the  marching  orders  of  a  journalist,  as  I 
claimed,  but  that  her  acquaintance  with 
American  journalism  led  her  to  feel  that 
they  were  strictly  what  are  known  as  sealed 
orders.  None  the  less,  they  are  the  orders 
of  the  journalist.  It  is  because  of  his  fidu- 
ciary capacity ;  it  is  because  he  has  succeeded 
in  drawing  together  a  great  procession  which 
looks  to  see  him  take  a  prescribed  route;  it 
is  because  he  works  within  these  narrow  and 
strictly   representative   conditions   that   his 


THEORY  35 

moral  responsibility  becomes  deep,  potent, 
and  would  be  overwhelming  if  he  were  not 
aware  that  no  man — I  care  not  how  ill  the 
effects  of  his  skill  may  be — has  this  call  and 
work,  but  there  has  been  implanted  in  him 
that  singular,  separate,  and  individual  ca- 
pacity to  express  and  to  lead  the  multitude, 
whose  very  possession  is  itself  a  responsibil- 
ity. Still  more  if  one  be  called  to  many 
walks  in  journalism,  to  the  meeting  of  many 
men  and  the  reading  of  many  newspapers, 
and  to  acquaintance  with  newspaper  files 
over  a  span  of  time  longer  than  his  own  life, 
he  gradually  comes  to  see  that  the  dye  mas- 
ters the  dyer's  hand,  that  no  man  ever  exer- 
cises this  great  power,  however  flagrant  may 
have  been  his  sins,  however  far  ambition  and 
desire  have  grown,  and  the  still  subtler  temp- 
tation of  enjoying  the  broad  bruit  of  the 
many  at  any  cost,  but  gradually,  as  he 
comes  to  attract  them  and,  having  at- 
tracted, to  represent  them,  he  himself  is 
trained  by  his  work,  elevated  by  it,  and  in- 
variably ends  by  editing  a  better  newspaper 
than  he  began  to  do.* 

What  has  happened  historically  is  simple. 

*  The  lecture  ceases  here. 


36  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

With  the  psychology  of  a  crowd  we  have 
all  grown  familiar.  In  the  Hellenic  city- 
state,  this  held  the  soul  of  a  people  in  the 
throng  drawn  together  in  the  market-place 
before  the  bema,  the  rostrum.  The  com- 
mon consciousness  of  the  gathered  citizenry, 
itself  the  state,  awoke  under  the  speaker's 
voice.  Consciousness,  knowledge,  argu- 
ment, intellection  succeeded  each  other  and 
in  the  end  there  came  the  will  and  act  of 
the  state. 

As  the  city-state  grew,  this  organism  of 
the  citizen  crowd  ceased  to  express  the 
state.  It  acted  through  the  many  organ- 
isms whose  growth  is  recorded  in  the  history 
of  political  institutions.  Imperator,  prin- 
ceps,  king,  representative  bodies,  these  all 
succeeded  each  other,  but  no  one  of  them 
gave  the  state,  in  all  its  transformations,  a 
common  consciousness  acting  through  all 
its  mass.  The  printing-press  diffused  opin- 
ion and  fact,  but  as  long  as  only  ten  to 
twenty  per  cent  of  the  adult  population 
could  read,  only  class  government  could 
exist,  be  conscious,  know,  feel,  will,  act. 
Protestantism  did  not  begin  general  educa- 
tion.    This  existed  long  before.     The  foun- 


THEORY  37 

dation  of  Protestantism  rested  on  the  con- 
ception that  all  must  read  so  that  the  open 
Bible  could  be  read  by  all.  This  created  a 
religious  conviction  and  a  political  demand 
that  all  must  read  that  God's  will  may  be 
known  to  all  and  political  freedom  was  won 
by  the  sword  to  protect  religious  choice. 

As  literacy  grew  and  illiteracy  diminished, 
the  roots  of  the  newspaper  spread  through  a 
new  and  fertile  soil,  taking  root  downward 
and  bearing  fruit  upward.  The  circula- 
tion of  the  newspaper  grows  and  spreads  as 
literacy  in  one  tongue  becomes  universal. 
When  the  newspaper  became  so  organized 
through  the  telegraph  that  news,  public 
utterance,  party  opinion,  and  action  fol- 
lowed the  advancing  morning  of  a  conti- 
nent, a  nation  of  100,000,000  began  to  have 
a  common  consciousness,  closely  akin  to 
that  of  the  throng  of  citizens  in  the  agora 
of  the  Hellenic  city-state.  Democracy  again 
became  possible. 

All  dailies,  in  a  sense  all  periodicals,  dis- 
charge the  office,  task  and  working  of  a  com- 
mon national  consciousness.  This  is  done 
independently  of  the  opinion  of  the  news- 
paper and  its  editorial  expression. 


38  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

This  function  becomes  inherent  in  every 
daily  and  this  task  gives  platform,  publicity, 
point,  and  potency  to  utterance.  The  more 
complete  and  universal  the  discharge  of 
this  task,  the  more  general  in  the  newspaper 
office  becomes  a  sense  of  the  direct  responsi- 
bility of  a  newspaper  to  the  whole  of  society. 
The  man  who  enters  newspaper  work  has, 
at  the  beginning,  a  passion  for  personal  ex- 
pression and  prominence.  Some  keep  this 
to  the  end.  Some  appear  in  periodicals, 
daily,  weekly,  or  monthly,  individually  or 
anonymously.  The  w^eightier  newspapers 
in  their  impact  and  effect  on  the  opinion  of 
the  public  are  those  in  which  a  small  group 
of  able  journalists  have  worked  together 
anonymously.  The  journalist  who  has 
worked  both  anonymously,  day  in  and  day 
out,  and  individually,  by  articles,  finds  that 
in  the  long  run  the  former  is  the  more  ef- 
fective. 

Whatever  path  a  man  may  take,  however 
personal  may  be  his  ambition,  the  universal 
and  general  responsibility  to  the  many 
sways,  educates,  and  recasts.  In  our  own 
day,  in  the  English-speaking  world,  there 
are    great    creators    of    newspapers    whose 


THEORY  39 

methods  for  the  first  twenty  or  twenty-five 
years  of  their  careers  have  been  felt  by 
sound  journahsts  to  be  evil  and  only  evil, 
and  that  continually.  But  the  task  to  which 
they  addressed  themselves  educated  and 
inspired  the  sense  of  public  responsibility  to 
moral  standards.  This  grew  until  their 
newspapers  have  done  more,  and  more  cour- 
ageously, to  support  certain  moral  issues 
than  any  other,  though  there  remained  per- 
sonal ambition,  much  preachment,  and 
methods  harmful  to  the  stability,  the  sanity, 
and  the  just  action  of  the  state  and  of  so- 
ciety. 

The  man  or  the  woman  who  turns  to  the 
newspaper  will  be  wise  if  they  consider 
these  things,  ponder  well  the  theory  and 
necessary  action  and  office  of  the  newspaper, 
and  understand  that  to  minister  and  not  to 
be  ministered  unto  will  be  their  calling,  and 
their  best  and  highest  work  will  be  through 
the  sacrifice  of  self  and  of  personal  notoriety. 
Every  journalist  knows  men  whose  names 
are  scarcely  known  to  the  profession,  much 
less  to  the  public,  but  who  are  the  moving 
springs  of  the  best  in  a  great  newspaper, 
for  of  such  is  the  kingdom  of  journalism. 


40  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

This  task  and  this  career,  these  opportun- 
ities and  this  wide-spread  influence,  have 
their  detriments,  drawbacks,  and  disabil- 
ities which  no  man  and  no  woman  entering 
the  work  of  journalism  should  overlook  or 
fail  to  weigh  and  consider.  A  salaried  posi- 
tion, removable  at  brief  notice,  will  be  the 
lot  of  the  overwhelming  majority  of  those 
who  work  in  large  cities  and  on  dailies.  The 
country  weekly  and  the  small  daily,  to- 
gether with  technical  journals,  offer  oppor- 
tunities for  securing  a  share  In  ownership 
even  for  those  of  small  means  or  savings.  I 
have  dealt  in  a  succeeding  chapter*  with  the 
size  of  these  salaries  and  incomes.  I  touch 
now  only  upon  the  circumstance  that  a  sal- 
aried position  is  before  most  newspaper  men 
and  women,  and  the  law  throws  around  the 
position  fewer  safeguards  in  our  States  than 
do  court  decisions,  usage,  and  statutes  in  the 
United  Kingdom  and  most  European  lands. 
Contracts  for  a  term  of  years  for  the  more 
important  positions  and  the  abler  men  are 
frequent,  but  these  exist  for  but  few  posts 
and  few  journalists. 

This  new  calling,   however  important  it 

*  Chapter  VIII,  "Pay  and  Pecuniary  Reward." 


THEORY  41 

may  be  in  fact,  cannot  in  the  nature  of 
things,  recent  as  it  is,  have  the  prescriptive 
position  and  conventional  respect,  both  of- 
ten empty,  which  attach  to  law,  medicine, 
and  divinity.  Men  and  women  leak  into 
journalism  in  all  sorts  of  ways  and  under 
pressure  of  a  manifold  order.  The  three 
callings  I  have  named  have  for  generations 
been  creating  their  training,  their  traditions, 
and  their  position  in  society.  They  are 
sought  by  the  advantaged ;  journalism,  often 
by  the  disadvantaged.  The  faculty  of  medi- 
cine and  the  clerg>^  are  assumed  to  represent 
certain  standards  of  behavior  and  to  act  in 
accordance  with  certain  canons  of  their  call- 
ing. These  are  assumed  in  their  members 
by  society  as  a  whole  and  they  are  enforced 
by  serious  penalties.  The  newspaperman 
at  present,  has  to  prove  himself  worthy, 
though  membership  on  the  stafif  of  certain 
carefully  conducted  newspapers  and  gradu- 
ates of  widely  known  Schools  of  Journalism 
begin  to  enjoy  an  accepted  position. 

More  serious  still,  the  three  callings  cited 
are  not  only  drawn,  as  to  much  of  their  mem- 
bership, from  the  advantaged;  these  profes- 
sions   are    approved    by    the    advantaged. 


42  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

Journalism  is  not  so  approved.  Its  chief 
achievement  in  the  past  and  its  chief  task 
in  the  future  is  to  reduce  the  advantages  of 
the  advantaged.  For  this,  it  came  into  the 
world.  It  is  the  chief  weapon  created  by 
the  many  to  this  end.  Publicity  destroys 
the  advantages  of  the  few.  The  accounts, 
the  expenditures,  and  the  revenues  of  gov- 
ernments were  for  generations  kept  secret 
and  unpublished  because  it  was  profitable 
for  those  who  ruled  to  do  so.  The  proceed- 
ings of  Parliaments  and  even  of  our  Amer- 
ican legislatures  were  once  secret  as  were  the 
policy,  the  purposes,  the  diplomacy,  and 
even  the  agreements  and  treaties  of  nations, 
and  still  are  at  many  points.  It  was  the 
newspaper  that  made  public  the  affairs  of 
political  parties,  whose  conventions  once  sat 
in  secret  as  did  the  Federalist  Convention 
at  Hartford  in  1814.  The  expenditure  of 
parties  has  been  made  public  by  newspapers 
in  our  current  day.  Banks,  railroads,  busi- 
ness in  all  its  forms,  and  corporations  in 
general,  all  fought  for  secrecy  and  enjoyed 
it  down  to  a  half  century  or  so  ago.  The 
newspaper  has  not  yet  completed  the  task 
of  making  these  as  open  as  the  day. 

This  is  true  of  the  newspaper  in  all  its 


THEORY  43 

work  and  in  all  the  walks  of  life.  It  is  al- 
ways turning  over  stones  in  the  world's 
fields,  large  and  small,  and  all  manner  of 
creeping  things  wriggle  and  run  away,  often 
to  their  ending.  No  one  who  experiences 
this  likes  the  experience  or  enjoys  it.  At 
one  time  and  another  those  who  possess 
privilege  suffer  from  these  disclosures.  The 
man  who  turns  to  journalism  needs  to  re- 
member these  duties,  demands,  and  disad- 
vantages. They  exist.  They  cannot  be 
changed.  As  the  community  grows  better, 
its  legislation  wiser,  its  administration  more 
efficient  and  both  less  touched  by  self-in- 
terest, there  will  be  less  to  expose;  but  so- 
ciety as  a  whole  and  individually  always 
needs  improvement  and  always  will.  The 
professional  improver  never  will  be  popular. 
Mr.  Set-it-right  is  pretty  sure  not  to  be 
wanted  in  many  clubs  and  is  apt  to  be  re- 
garded as  was  Paul,  a  pestilent  fellow,  who 
has  come  to  turn  the  world  upside  down. 

The  newspaper  and  the  newspaperman 
share  this  attitude  and  suffer  this  penalty. 
His  pay  is  not  large  and  was  once  precari- 
ous, his  work  is  not  popular,  and  his  habit 
and  frame  of  mind  are  apt  to  be  an  annoy- 
ance to   society  and   to   individuals.     The 


44  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

frame  of  mind  which  challenges  the  day's 
working  round  is  always  a  personal  handi- 
cap. These  have  their  compensations,  their 
rewards,  and  their  hid  joys,  but  those  who 
are  considering  the  calling  should  ask  them- 
selves if  they  have  the  tough  stuff  which 
fears  not,  knows  the  delights  of  sheer  op- 
pugnacity,  and  welcomes  the  choice  of  Ish- 
mael  and  all  his  tribe  to  whom  every  desert 
is  a  home  and  whose  hand  is  against  every 
man's  hand. 

The  newspapermen  with  desk  places  dodge 
most  of  this.  Some  newspaper  work  is 
little  exposed  to  it,  but  most  of  it  is,  and 
the  men  at  the  top  who  have  done  great 
work,  if  they  are  protected  from  personal 
smarts,  find  from  time  to  time  that  their 
families  suffer  and  their  sons  may  find  that 
the  social  privileges  of  college  are  closed  to 
them.  But  if  you  are  really  made  for  a 
newspaperman  you  will  rejoice  in  these 
things,  count  them  for  righteousness  and 
treat  them  as  naught  by  the  work  the  news- 
paper accomplishes  in  revealing  society  to 
itself  and  convicting  it  of  sin  that  it  may 
mend  its  ways. 


Ill 

THE  APPOINTED  TASK,  PRACTICE 

The  sum  of  the  whole  matter,  therefore, 
is  that  the  newspaper  as  an  organization 
and  organism  carries  out  that  creation  of 
the  consciousness  of  the  many  which  is  the 
necessary  foundation  of  free  government. 
Doing  this  work,  all  connected  with  it  as- 
sume great  responsibilities.  These  respon- 
sibilities are  the  responsibilities  of  the  state. 
They  may  be  distorted  and  degraded  to  a 
devil's  doctrine  as  they  are  by  Macchiavelli 
in  The  Prince;  they  may  be  treated  as 
the  most  sacred  of  all  ofificial  stations,  sum- 
ming all  those  various  ofBces  devised  by  the 
one  race,  the  Roman,  which  has  given  les- 
sons in  government  to  all  the  world  after, 
as  the  Jew  gave  lessons  in  morals  and  the 
Hellene  lessons  in  beauty.  The  newspaper, 
not  as  mere  metaphor,  is  the  tribune  of  the 
people,  who  protects  its  rights  and  can,  with 
the  uplifted  hand  of  publicity  stop  any  man ; 
the  censor,  who  values  and  estimates  each 
of  his  fellow  citizens  and  in  the  long  run 

45 


46  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

unerringly  assigns  to  him  the  place  which 
he  shall  finally  occupy;  the  pontifex  maxi- 
mus,  to  whom  is  committed  the  secret  power 
of  the  commonwealth,  in  whose  custody 
are  its  ultimate  decisions  and  in  whose 
penetralia  there  lie  hidden  the  spear  and 
shield  which,  at  moments  of  peril  to  the 
state,  move  of  themselves  and  sound  a  call 
that  embodies  its  armed  powers. 

But  the  ofificer  of  the  state,  as  we  all 
realize,  can  never  be  a  free-lance.  He  can 
never  speak  solely  for  himself.  If  he  be- 
long even  to  the  group  from  whom  must  be 
selected  those  who  exercise  power,  he  is 
bound  by  something  of  the  same  loyalty 
to  the  continuity  of  the  state  which  is  im- 
posed upon  those  who  are  actually  in  power. 
When  Wellington  was  asked  why  he  as- 
sumed office  under  conditions,  circumstances, 
and  a  policy  at  variance  with  all  his  pre- 
vious career,  his  just  and  sufficient  answer 
to  the  taunt  and  sneer  of  Brougham  was, 
"Sir,  the  King's  Government  must  be  car- 
ried on."  There  come,  of  course,  times  of 
revolution  when  the  king's  government 
must  not  be  carried  on,  and  those  men  are 
best  in  the  state  who,  instead  of  serving  it, 


PRACTICE  47 

overturn  It  and  risk,  in  the  fine  phrase 
of  the  Declaration  of  Independence,  "our 
lives,  our  fortunes,  and  our  sacred  honor." 
But  a  habit  of  overturning  governments 
leads  straight  to  the  Spanish-American  re- 
public. For  the  most  part,  men  must  take 
things  as  they  are  in  public  life,  improve 
them  at  every  point,  ready  always  to  sup- 
port reform  in  a  minority,  determined  al- 
ways to  secure  such  advances  as  are  pos- 
sible without  parting  from  the  great  forces 
of,  and  the  parties  in,  society,  and  speaking, 
whenever  they  are  in  authority  or  ofitice, 
with  the  restraint,  the  responsibility,  the 
reserve,  and  the  consciousness  of  what  must 
not  be  said,  as  well  as  with  the  conviction 
of  what  must,  necessarily,  be  said  under 
free  institutions. 

These  conditions,  the  journalist  shares  in 
all  his  relations  to  his  work,  because  in  all 
of  them  he  is  himself  representative,  fidu- 
ciary, and  responsible  for  a  larger  whole. 
Exactly  as  the  man  in  public  life  is  careful 
to  associate  himself  in  politics  with  some 
one  of  the  great  parties,  in  local  govern- 
ment with  efforts  for  improvement  in  so- 
cial movements,   with   the   broad   creed   to 


48  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

which  he  subscribes,  individualistic  or  not, 
as  the  case  may  be,  and  then  remembers 
in  all  his  acts  and  words  the  various  respon- 
sibilities which  attach  to  organized  life,  so 
the  newspaper  and  the  journalist,  both  un- 
der a  similar  responsibility,  are  guided  and 
controlled  by  similar  limitations.  These 
are  the  limitations  of  the  judge  who  decides 
each  case  according  to  the  law  and  prece- 
dent which  he  finds,  modifying,  adapting, 
adjusting  the  law  to  new  needs,  but  never 
carrying  this  farther  than  liberties,  secured 
through  law,  broadening  down  from  prece- 
dent to  precedent,  show  Is  wise  alike  for 
the  rights  of  the  individual  and  the  security 
of  the  state.  Through  all  the  hierarchy  of 
ofifice  the  same  conditions  subsist.  If  any- 
one has  talked  with  one  American  Presi- 
dent after  another  during  the  last  thirty 
years  about  questions  of  public  policy.  In 
that  individual  confidence  which  the  trusted 
correspondent  and  editor  enjoys,  he  has 
again  and  again  heard  the  chief  magistrate 
of  the  United  States  say,  "I  believe  thus 
and  so,  but  it  is  not  possible  to  do  more 
than  thus  and  so,  and  in  my  approaching 
message  I  shall — "  and  so  on. 


PRACTICE  49 

No  man  can  permit  these  various  condi- 
tioning conditions  to  lead  into  a  departure 
from  the  truth,  the  use  of  an  unsound  argu- 
ment, the  advocacy  of  a  poHcy  which  he  be- 
lieves harmful  to  the  state,  or  the  acquies- 
cence in  known  evil  or  secret  wrong,  but  in 
dealing  with  all  these  he  is  acting,  not  alone 
for  himself  but  for  others.  The  journalist, 
like  a  public  prosecutor,  can  only  bring 
charges  when  he  has  the  evidence  to  sustain 
them,  and  not  a  mere  moral  conviction  of 
guilt.  He  can  urge  the  advance  no  further 
and  no  faster  than  will  enable  a  newspaper 
to  keep  in  touch  with  the  advance.  He 
must  consider  what  will  be  done  in  the  fu- 
ture as  well  as  what  has  been  done  in  the 
past.  Since  he  has  a  continuous  audience, 
he  cannot  take  the  liberties  of  a  pamphleteer. 
Since  he  represents  a  settled  body  of  opin- 
ion, he  cannot  make  the  sharp  and,  it  may 
be,  the  witty  thrusts  of  the  critic,  who  seeks 
only  to  express  a  personal  opinion.  He  will 
prepare  the  public  for  reforms  in  countless 
ways  that  are  open  to  him,  but  their  open 
advocacy  will  come  like  the  decision  of  a 
judge,  not  on  a  moot  case  or  on  possibilities, 
but  on  the  actual  presence  of  a  public  issue 


50  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

by  which  the  reform  can  be  directly  ad- 
vanced. 

There  will  doubtless  come  times  of  up- 
heaval, of  sweeping  and  sudden  change, 
when  for  a  season  periodicals  that  are  asso- 
ciated with  some  far-reaching  reform,  work 
with  great  initiative  and  headlong  onset. 
Some  great  leader  may  detach  himself  and 
act  individually.  But  the  instant  the  battle 
line  is  set,  a  party  organized,  a  platform 
adopted,  a  general  policy  under  way,  and 
the  touch  of  the  elbow  felt  through  all  the 
marching  column,  the  old  conditions  reas- 
sert themselves.  Such  a  leader  will  then  be 
charged  with  issuing  some  peremptory  com- 
mands which  he  has  condemned  in  others. 
He  will  adjust  the  policy  of  his  party  to  one 
thing  in  one  stage  and  to  another  thing  in 
another  stage.  The  periodicals  that  are 
working  with  him  will  begin  to  defend  acts 
in  the  service  of  the  cause  they  now  advocate 
which  they  have  condemned  in  the  opposi- 
tion, and  all  concerned  will  pass  under  the 
law  which  increases  the  service  of  the  indi- 
vidual in  exact  proportion  as  the  individual 
becomes  merged  in  the  general  service. 

This  view  of  the  responsibilities  and  of  the 


PRACTICE  51 

moral  obligations,  both  of  the  newspaper 
and  of  the  journalist,  while  not  often  clearly 
conceived  or  accurately  stated,  suffuses  the 
whole  atmosphere  of  the  newspaper  ofBce. 
Every  man  in  it  is  in  the  constant  habit  of 
discriminating  and  differencing  between  his 
own  personal  opinion  and  the  general  policy 
of  the  paper.  The  newspaper  itself,  through 
all  its  departments,  will  be  colored  by  its 
own  past.  It  has  a  vitality  and  life  of  its 
own,  and  this  embraces  and  controls  the 
vitality  and  the  lives  of  those  who  work 
on  it. 

There  is  also  the  action  and  the  reaction 
which  comes  from  personal  initiative.  The 
man  whose  training  has  given  him  clear-cut 
principles  In  regard  to  public  life,  who  under- 
stands the  intricate  mechanism  of  society, 
who  first  sees  through  earth's  mists  the 
coming  of  the  dawn,  who  knows  months, 
and  it  may  be  years  in  advance,  the  future 
issue,  and  on  every  occasion  prepares  the 
public  mind  by  advocacy,  who  never  misses 
the  opportunity  to  be  instant  in  reproof,  in 
correction,  in  exposition  in  regard  to  those 
questions  about  which  the  public  mind  is 
still  clouded,  gradually  learns,  if  he  have  the 


52  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

instincts  of  a  journalist,  to  lead,  without  los- 
ing all  the  advantages  of  organized  action, 
not  only  a  newspaper  but  a  community 
toward  reforms,  which  finally  come  without 
shock  because  for  years  he  has  been  by 
every  agency  urging  the  principle  and  prac- 
tice from  whose  teaching  they  must  inevita- 
bly come. 

As  social  life  becomes  more  complex,  the 
problems  of  administration,  of  Federal,  of 
state,  and  of  local  government  become  more 
technical,  the  journalist  who  is  trained  is 
able  to  do  all  this  without  shock  or  depar- 
ture, because  he  knows  and  can  constantly 
show  what  should  be  done. 

In  the  Federal  purview  questions  of  taxa- 
tion, whether  of  internal  revenue,  of  cus- 
toms, of  income  tax,  of  inheritance  taxes,  of 
the  regulation  of  corporations,  the  control 
and  regulation  of  interstate  commerce,  of  the 
currency,  of  banking,  of  foreign  policy,  and 
of  Federal  action,  will  be  most  influenced  by 
the  man  who  knows  most  about  them.  As 
the  country  grows  larger,  its  resources 
greater,  the  responsibilities  of  the  central 
government  more  exacting,  and  the  risk  of 
a  blunder  in  legislation  more  serious,  mere 


PRACTICE  53 

politics,  once  enough  for  the  journalist  when 
the  United  States  was  a  mere  enlarged 
frontier  stretching  West,  ceases  to  be  ade- 
quate for  a  journalist  in  a  great  world  power, 
with  half  the  banking  of  the  world  within 
its  limits,  nearly  half  its  railroads  and  tele- 
graphs, island  possessions  in  the  East  and 
in  the  West,  a  world-changing  work  like  the 
Panama  Canal,  and  a  navy  equal  to  any  in 
the  world.  These  need  trained  knowledge 
far  wider  than  the  politics  of  party. 

Time  was,  nor  long  ago,  when  the  chief 
state  institutions  in  most  commonwealths 
were  its  state  prisons.  It  is  less  than  a  cen- 
tury since  any  state  began  the  care  on  a  great 
scale  of  the  defective  and  the  dependent. 
Hammond's  History  of  New  York,  through 
the  close  of  the  eighteenth  and  half  of  the 
nineteenth  century,  deals  mostly  with  the 
strife  of  parties  and  the  cabals  and  conflicts 
of  leaders.  New  York  State  to-day  is  a 
commonwealth  whose  activities  lie  not  only 
in  electing  governors  or  the  legislature,  but 
in  managing  aright  the  great  population  of 
the  insane,  the  epileptic,  the  goitrous,  the 
poverty-stricken  and  crime-tainted  within 
its  limits. 


54  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

I  am  myself  old  enough  to  have  known 
many  men  who  knew  New  York  when  it 
had  nothing  but  night-watchmen  in  its 
streets,  and  the  constables  and  deputy 
sheriffs  of  its  police  courts  and  its  shrievalty 
to  enforce  order. 

This  great  city  now  has  problems  infinitely 
more  complex  than  those  of  any  other  great 
centre  of  population  the  world  has  known 
since  Rome  was  officina  gentium.  This  calls 
for  a  corresponding  knowledge  of  civic  prob- 
lems, administrative,  sanitary,  in  public 
works,  in  police,  in  pauperism,  and  in  child- 
hood, normal,  retarded,  and  abnormal.  The 
whole  field  of  individual  sociological  work 
has  been  added  to  the  newspaper  within  the 
last  forty  years,  almost  within  the  last 
twenty-five.  Private  charity  steadily  grows, 
organization  to  provide  for  the  many  has 
steadily  increased,  including  hospitals  as 
well  as  those  ordinarily  called  charities. 
Individual  initiative  is  constantly  adding  to 
both. 

The  newspaper  is  the  one  channel  through 
which  all  these  seek  to  reach  their  public,  to 
make  themselves  known,  and  to  gather  the 
public  support  which  renders  their  success 


PRACTICE  55 

possible.  This  entire  task  of  guiding  the 
charitable  energies  of  the  community,  mak- 
ing its  wants  known  to  itself,  and  saving  it 
from  its  own  freakish  impulses  falls  to  the 
newspaper  because  it  alone  is  read  by  both 
rich  and  poor,  those  who  are  professionally 
and  those  who  are  not  professionally  inter- 
ested in  this  task.  This  can  only  be  carried 
out  if  a  journalist  is  willing  to  give  himself 
thorough  training  in  this  field  and  keeps  up 
a  close  familiarity  with  its  literature.  If  he 
does  this  he  will  not  be  misled  by  mere  sym- 
pathy into  doing  grave  evil  to  the  charities 
of  the  community,  and  he  will  be  able  to  do 
an  amount  of  popular  education  which,  if  he 
carries  it  on  for  years  together  in  the  un- 
known but  efficient  fashion  in  which  the  edi- 
torial writer  or  special  reporter  can  do  his 
work,  will  prepare  the  way  for  an  advance 
in  every  possible  direction. 

Religious  news  scarcely  appeared  in  the 
daily  paper  of  even  forty  years  ago,  and  the 
utmost  that  was  done  was  to  follow  any  ab- 
normal occurrence,  such  as  a  scandal  affect- 
ing a  clergyman  or  a  division  in  a  great  de- 
nomination ;  but  the  regular  run  of  news  was 
little  regarded.     To-day  every  newspaper  is 


56  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

constantly  dealing  with  the  current  news  of 
religious  bodies.  Ex-president  Patton,  of 
Princeton,  said  to  me  some  twenty-five  years 
ago  that  when  he  became  a  clergyman  he 
took  The  Presbyterian  because  he  was  in 
grave  doubt  whether  Saint  Peter  would  pass 
a  Presbyterian  clergyman  who  did  not  ap- 
pear with  it  in  his  pocket,  and  he  read  no 
daily  paper.  "To-day,"  he  said,  "I  read 
more  news  about  church  afifairs  in  genersJ 
in  my  daily  paper  than  any  religious  weekly 
can  afford  to  print.  I  find  that  I  follow 
religious  afifairs  in  the  daily  papers."  This 
is  another  field  which  calls  for  technical 
knowledge  and  training,  and  in  which  the 
daily  newspaper  constitutes  the  only  uni- 
versal platform  on  which  all  sects  and  de- 
nominations meet. 

The  practical  result  of  this  is  that  pre- 
cisely as  the  newspaper  man  finds  before 
him  many  diverging  paths  along  which,  if 
will,  ability,  and  principle  be  his,  he  can  in- 
fluence the  political  and  the  administrative 
life  of  society,  its  reforms,  its  coming  laws, 
its  philanthropy,  its  letters,  its  drama,  its 
art,  so  he  can  both  express  and  affect  the 
religious   life   of   the   day.     The   American 


PRACTICE  57 

newspaper  not  only  gives  more  news  about 
churches  and  reports  more  sermons  than 
the  press  of  other  countries,  but  it  pays 
more  attention  to  the  Christian  and  to  the 
Jewish  year.  It  notes  fasts  and  festivals. 
In  many  newspapers  these  days  are  annu- 
ally noticed  on  the  editorial  page.  Sunday- 
school  lessons  are  widely  printed.  Doctor 
William  T.  Ellis  has  the  largest  Sunday- 
school  class  conducted  by  any  one  an3rvvhere 
in  his  syndicated  lessons.  The  trend  of  re- 
ligious thought,  the  training  of  the  clergy, 
their  work  and  influence,  the  position  and 
prosperity  of  the  church  and  of  its  various 
communions,  these  all  are  discussed  in  the 
press  of  the  United  States  more  than  in  any 
other  secular  press,  the  United  Kingdom  not 
excepted.  This  is  natural.  The  United 
States  is  the  only  nation  which  has  an  annual 
Thanksgiving.  Our  census  records  religious 
statistics  as  does  no  other  national  enumera- 
tion. Our  financial  outlay  and  investment 
is  far  greater. 

But  the  Christian  man  who  enters  jour- 
nalism needs  to  remember  that  he  can  exert 
an  Influence  commensurate  with  his  oppor- 
tunity only  as  he  gives  to  the  Bible,  Chris- 


58  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

tian  history,  the  tenets,  life,  and  character  of 
the  various  divisions  of  the  religious  life  of 
the  land  the  same  study  which  the  financial 
editor  gives  to  finance,  or  the  political  editor 
to  politics.  Such  a  man  must  practise  what 
he  preaches.  His  daily  life  must  reflect  his 
faith,  and  unless  he  goes  to  church  regularly, 
at  whatever  sacrifice,  his  newspaper  articles 
will  be  regarded.  In  his  own  office,  as  "bunk." 
With  this  increase  in  the  topics  of  the 
newspaper,  which  has  so  greatly  extended 
both  its  own  task  and  the  opportunity  which 
it  offers,  there  has  also  come,  and  almost 
wholly  through  the  policy  and  energetic  work 
of  Joseph  Pulitzer,  the  habit  in  American 
newspapers  of  giving  steadily  the  utterances, 
the  acts,  and  the  declarations  of  all  sides. 
When  Mr.  Pulitzer  acquired  the  New  York 
World  In  1883  there  was  no  New  York  paper 
which  freely  printed  the  news  in  regard  to 
its  opponents.  All  did  much  more  of  this 
between  1875  and  1885  than  they  had  be- 
tween 1855  and  1865,  when  none  of  them 
did  it.  The  stress  and  Interest  arising  from 
the  Civil  War  between  1865  and  1875  and 
the  repeated  breaking  up  of  parties  at  that 
time  led  newspapers  to  begin  this  task.     It 


PRACTICE  59 

continued  under  the  impulse  of  the  reform 
movements  which  nearly  seated  President 
Tilden  in  the  presidential  chair  and  both 
elected  and  seated  Grover  Cleveland.  But 
it  was  the  rule  that  papers  gave  scant  space 
to  the  views  with  which  they  did  not  agree, 
and  colored  all  accounts  of  everything  which 
related,  not  only  in  politics  but  in  other 
affairs,  to  the  views  of  organizations  to  which 
they  were  opposed. 

Joseph  Pulitzer  changed  all  this  by  print- 
ing one  side  as  fully  as  the  other,  and  the 
effect  of  his  policy,  and  still  more  its  success, 
led  to  a  profound  change  in  American  news- 
papers, which  are  to-day  at  this  point  in  ad- 
vance of  those  of  any  other  country.  In 
1896  it  came  about  in  addition  that  nearly 
the  whole  Democratic  press  on  the  silver 
question  took  a  hard  money  position,  and 
opposed  the  silver  craze,  partly  because  of 
the  convictions  of  its  editors  and  partly  be- 
cause the  newspaper  had  become  a  great 
business,  with  a  special  stake  in  a  sound 
currency,  which  did  not  exist  in  the  earlier 
currency  periods  when  the  newspaper  was  a 
small  business.  These  two  causes  greatly 
limbered  up  the  American  newspaper,  both 


6o  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

in  what  it  printed  and  in  its  editorial  and 
news  policy.  The  millennium  has  not  come 
at  this  point,  and  pretty  much  every  news- 
paper has  its  definite  drift  in  regard  to 
news,  partly  because  selection  is  inevitable 
with  the  widening  field  of  news,  and  selec- 
tion requires  system,  and,  partly,  because 
newspapers  are  edited  by  human  beings, 
with  like  passions  and  predilections  as  other 
men  and  women.  The  newspaper  platform, 
taken  as  a  whole,  is  much  more  a  platform 
free  to  all  aspects  of  the  community — again 
a  proof  of  the  growth  of  the  unconscious 
discharge  of  service — than  it  was  in  the 
past,  and  it  promises  to  grow  in  this  direc- 
tion more  and  more.  The  criticism  that 
newspapers  still  print  only  one  side  is  prin- 
cipally, and  nearly  always,  due  to  the  fact 
that  for  every  man  the  space  given  to  his 
own  side  always  seems  short  and  inadequate, 
and  any  space  whatever  given  to  what  he 
opposes,  seems  unduly  long  and  partial. 

This  widening  field  of  the  newspaper  exists 
nowhere  except  in  the  United  States.  Even 
the  London  Times  still  weekly  culls  its  reli- 
gious news  from  the  leading  religious  papers, 
and  on  various  topics  it  gives  the  news  as  pre- 


PRACTICE  6i 

sented  in  technical  publications.  Wherever 
a  matter  is  of  general  interest  the  newspaper 
here  steadily  seeks  to  anticipate  it,  often 
with  inaccuracy,  with  lack  of  knowledge, 
with  want  of  perspective,  but  still  so  as  to 
diffuse  an  interest  and  acquaintance  through 
great  masses  such  as  exists  nowhere  else. 

This  has  enormously  added  to  the  inten- 
sity of  the  technical  training  of  the  news- 
paperman. The  newspaper  is  no  longer,  as 
it  was  when  its  present  development  began 
with  the  great  increase  of  circulation  which 
took  place  between  1880  and  1895,  composed 
of  city  and  night  desk  news,  editorial,  and 
criticism;  it  takes  up  in  one  way  and 
another  every  possible  phase  of  human  ac- 
tivity, and  it  often  does  this  better  and  with 
a  clearer  vision  in  the  papers  which  are 
looked  upon  as  "yellow"  than  is  the  case  in 
papers  which  keep  to  the  old  lines.  But  this 
kind  of  work  does  harm  and  not  good,  dif- 
fuses evil  and  not  benefit,  unless  it  is  carried 
on  by  those  who  are  trained.  This  demand 
for  technical  news  on  railroads,  bond  issues, 
manufactures,  engineering  projects,  the  great 
staples,  metals,  cereals,  cotton,  wool,  silk, 
the   retail   trade,    has   in   the   past   twenty 


62  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

years  developed  a  new  type  of  newspaper- 
man, well  paid,  who  is  daily  dealing  with 
the  great  economic  issues  of  society.  The 
college  man  who  has  journalism  in  mind 
needs  economic  courses  and  technical  study. 
Writing  and  literature  are  well,  but  a  man 
who  desires  to  do  serious  work  and  get  good 
pay,  should  take,  besides  plenty  of  history 
in  college,  at  least  two  courses  in  chemistry 
and  economics,  and  one  each  in  physics,  in 
biology,  in  geology,  and  on  the  great  staples, 
though  few  colleges  give  this  last. 

The  newspaper  that  recognizes  this  and 
the  man  who  had  this  training  have  widened 
therefore  the  channels  of  public  service  in  a 
degree  never  before  known.  In  politics  and 
on  specific  issues  the  great  mass  may  be  less 
led  by  the  newspaper  than  it  once  was, 
though  no  one  familiar  with  the  past  history 
of  journalism  will  be  certain  about  this,  but 
the  great  mass  is  unquestionably  far  more 
educated,  informed,  and  influenced  by  the 
newspaper  than  it  was  once  in  regard  to 
home  affairs.  In  foreign  affairs  the  Ameri- 
can newspaper  gives  relatively  less  than  it 
once  did,  has  surrendered  its  place,  and  one 
of  the  objects  of  every  School  of  Journalism 


PRACTICE  63 

must  be  to  send  out  those  who  are  familiar 
with  affairs  outside  of  the  boundaries  of  the 
United  States,  who  understand  the  way  in 
which  this  news  should  be  presented,  the 
tone  and  temper  in  which  foreign  relations 
should  be  discussed,  and  who  can  have  in- 
telligent opinions  as  to  the  policy  of  a  nation 
which,  within  twenty-five  years,  has  become 
one  of  the  five  ruling  powers. 

Service  for  the  many,  regardless  of  whether 
the  many  know  or  do  not  know  the  individ- 
ual who  gives  it,  permeates  this  whole  field 
of  the  newspaper,  new  and  old.  The  work 
can  only  be  done  fully  by  iteration,  through 
the  constant  policy  of  a  newspaper,  through 
the  manifold  opportunities  which  it  presents 
of  enforcing  a  certain  view  and  illuminating 
the  forming  factors  of  issues  before  the  fac- 
tors themselves  appear  upon  the  scene.  But 
with  the  growth  of  these  conditions,  which 
tend  constantly  to  sink  the  individual  in  the 
newspaper,  to  blend  many  lives  in  a  single 
changing  organism,  there  has  come  also  a 
great  increase  in  the  use  of  the  newspaper  as 
a  platform  through  which  the  whole  nation 
can  be  addressed.  Ex-President  Roosevelt 
was  the  first  man  in  our  history  who  has 


64  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

made  full  use  of  this  opportunity  and  set  an 
example  which  will  be  followed  by  every 
man  spurred  by  personal  ambition  or  devo- 
tion to  reform,  or  both,  consciously  or  un- 
consciously, with  desire  to  serve  or  deter- 
mination to  rule,  as  the  case  may  be,  in  each 
individual  instance. 

The  special  writer  has  taken  a  new  promi- 
nence through  this.  The  salaried  place 
was  once  the  only  secure  work  for  a  news- 
paperman. To-day  there  is  a  group,  not 
large  but  both  prominent  and  significant, 
of  men  who,  while  their  capacity  to  furnish 
just  what  the  public  wants  lasts,  receive 
always  an  adequate  and  often  an  ample 
support  while  their  precise  aptitude  grows. 
They  find  in  the  supplements  of  the  Sunday 
newspaper,  in  the  special  articles  of  the 
daily  newspaper,  in  the  weeklies  and  in  the 
magazines  a  market  for  their  wares,  which 
completes  the  evolution  which  I  have  been 
sketching,  which  began  with  the  pamphle- 
teer. This  cycle  ends  in  the  free  publication 
by  the  newspaper  of  what  is  essentially  a 
pamphlet,  whether  it  be  in  the  daily  or 
weekly,  an  utterance  by  a  great  public 
figure,  a  vivid  article  on  some  current  issue, 


PRACTICE  65 

or  a  discussion  of  some  evil  or  administra- 
tive abuse,  in  which  both  fact  and  opinion 
are  so  woven  together  that  each  supple- 
ments the  effect  of  the  other.  The  very 
size  of  a  newspaper,  the  great  increase  in 
the  circulation  of  weeklies  and  of  certain 
monthlies,  has  created  a  space  for  these 
things  in  the  one  instance  and  a  national 
audience  in  the  other.  The  individual 
writer  has  here  what  is  essentially  a  new 
opportunity,  but,  as  is  always  the  case  with 
the  individual  writer,  the  opportunity  never 
lasts  very  long,  and  at  the  end  of  five,  ten, 
or  fifteen  years  the  special  writer  finds  him- 
self succeeded  by  another  group  of  men  in 
this  field,  like  the  priest 

"who  slew  the  slayer 
And  shall  himself  be  slain." 

It  is  also  true  that  this  opinion,  while 
striking,  important,  useful,  and  spectacular, 
which  it  ought  to  be,  has  not  the  steady,  con- 
tinuous, cumulative  effect  of  the  daily  news- 
paper steadily  potting  away  at  the  same 
mark.  These  special  articles  remain  pamph- 
lets. They  are  not  part  of  that  unbroken 
continuum  which  constitutes  the  daily  news- 


66  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

paper,  whose  force  and  efficiency,  whose 
value,  responsibility,  and  peril  lies  in  the 
fact,  to  which  one  cannot  return  too  often, 
that  its  Importance  rests  on  the  circum- 
stance that  day  after  day  a  great  many 
people  want  it  and  that  a  great  many  peo- 
ple want  it  because  it  wants  them  and  ad- 
justs itself  to  the  task,  first,  of  getting  them, 
and  then  of  keeping  them,  under  the  con- 
ditions and  limitations  which  have  already 
been  sketched. 

In  all  these  classifications  lines  have  been 
drawn  and  differences  have  been  noted  be- 
cause discussion  of  the  newspaperman  is 
impossible  without  them,  but  It  is  idle  to 
suppose  that  any  of  these  things  can  be 
divided  up  In  the  actual  course  of  society, 
to  represent  classes,  families,  genera,  species, 
and  varieties  which  you  can  label  when  you 
see  them,  which  you  can  comfortably  docket 
in  your  mental  machinery  and  answer  ques- 
tions about  them  In  an  examination  paper. 
The  tasks  I  have  sketched  are  not  ready- 
made,  awaiting  the  man  they  fit.  The 
world  is  not  made  that  way;  neither  the 
world  of  man  nor,  though  laboratories  hate 
to  believe  It,  the  world  of  nature.     This  out- 


PRACTICE  67 

line  is  purely  general  and  suggestive.  The 
exceptions  are  almost  as  numerous  as  the 
rules.  Rules  are  principally  known,  not  be- 
cause one  has  seen  them  clearly,  but  because 
an  exception  has  drawn  attention  to  the 
fact  by  making  an  impression  upon  the  mind 
of  being  an  exception,  which  is  thus  a  proof 
that  somehow  or  other  one  had  gotten  an- 
other impression  of  a  rule.  In  nothing  is 
it  more  necessary  not  to  dogmatize,  to  have 
the  open  mind,  to  understand  that  every- 
thing changes,  that  all  things  are  in  a  per- 
petual flux  and  flow  than  in  the  newspaper. 
You  can  no  more,  in  discussing  the  news- 
paper, set  your  course,  tie  your  sheet,  and 
fasten  your  rudder  in  the  perpetual  moving 
alterations  of  the  sea  of  journalism  than 
you  can  on  a  flawy  day  off  a  coast  strewn 
with  reefs  and  spit  and  boulder,  with  the 
tide  running  and  the  wind  veering.  But 
the  broad  general  facts,  even  on  a  day  such 
as  I  have  sketched,  the  channel  marked  on 
the  chart  and  the  course  that  must  be  laid 
and  taken,  remain  unchanged  and  constant. 
The  daily  newspaper  as  a  daily  newspaper 
is  representative  and  not  for  personal  ex- 
ploitation.    It  may  be  exploited.     It  may 


68  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

exploit.  All  the  exceptions  in  the  world 
may  be  urged,  but  still  the  broad  fact  re- 
mains upon  which  I  have  been  insisting, 
which  grows  upon  one  through  all  the  years 
of  work  and  remains  the  cheer  and  inspira- 
tion of  a  weary  hour,  that  as  a  man  works, 
his  real  masters  are  a  silent  multitude  sleep- 
ing while  he  labors.  For  them  he  is  ac- 
curate. For  them  he  endeavors  to  give 
accuracy  the  flame  and  fire  of  original  ex- 
pression. For  them  he  is  peering  out  into 
the  unknown  vast  into  which  the  great  ship 
of  state  steadily  drives,  seeking,  hoping,  and 
sometimes  visibly  achieving  the  task  of  so 
expressing  opinion  through  the  years  that 
when  the  hour  strikes  the  audience  he  has 
addressed  responds  aright. 

Other  views  there  are.  "The  newspaper 
is  a  private  enterprise,"  said  Charles  Dudley 
Warner,  in  1881.  "Its  object  is  to  make 
money  for  its  owner."  The  Common  Law 
has  never  accepted  this  view  even  of  mere 
material  enterprises  which  trench  on  public 
need  and  service.  Much  less  is  it  true  of 
the  newspaper,  which  our  Constitutions 
protect  and  our  laws  charge  with  public 
duty. 


IV 

THE  PERSONAL  EQUIPMENT 

Personal  equipment  for  the  newspaper 
varies  through  all  the  human  gamut.  Cer- 
tain things  are  more  necessary.  Men  can 
succeed  without  any  of  them.  In  a  day 
when  prowess  in  war  turned  on  the  physi- 
cal equipment  demanded  by  spear,  mace, 
sword,  and  bow,  the  greatest  soldier  of  a 
thousand  years  was  Genghiz  Khan,  blind 
in  one  eye,  lame  in  his  left  leg,  short  in  his 
right  arm.  He  had  probably  had  a  very 
severe  case  of  infantile  paralysis;  but  he  is 
the  only  man  that  ever  lived  who  drove 
the  red  ploughshare  of  war  from  the  Medi- 
terranean to  the  Yellow  Sea.  So  in  all 
callings.  I  can  but  take  up  and  present 
the  average  demand  and  the  general  chance. 

Early  in  newspaper  work,  personal  access 
or  address  is  important,  though  able,  well- 
equipped  men  win  without  this.  Any  physi- 
cal lack,  lameness,  hard  hearing,  deficient 
eyesight,    imperfect    enunciation    count    in 

69 


70  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

all  callings.  All  have  been  surmounted, 
but  I  judge  from  experience  and  observa- 
tion that  they  are  more  of  a  handicap  for 
the  newspaperman  than  for  other  callings 
which  demand  education.  There  are  places 
in  the  law  ofifice  for  the  man  who  can  col- 
late cases,  in  medicine  for  the  laboratory 
worker,  in  engineering  for  desk  work,  in 
the  clergy  for  social  service.  The  news- 
paper ofhce  is  more  exacting.  "There  are 
no  fans  in  Hell,"  runs  an  Arab  proverb. 

A  man  needs  to  be  physically  sound  all 
through  for  the  newspaper.  I  am,  through- 
out in  this  volume,  working  with  the  daily 
in  mind  for  two  reasons.  The  dye  masters 
the  dyer's  hand.  My  life  is  all  newspaper. 
Its  resounding  audience  makes  all  else  in  the 
periodical  or  book  tame.  The  newspaper 
has  the  future.  It  has  sapped  the  religious 
weekly,  the  literary  and  political  weekly, 
many  magazines  and  literary  monthlies. 
The  only  weeklies  and  monthlies  that  last 
and  have  an  adequate  circulation  to-day  are 
those  that  draw  nearest  to  the  newspaper 
and  its  Sunday  supplement.  This  has  slain 
much  dear  in  the  past,  dear  to  men  of  letters. 
The  quarterly  that  began  for  the  English- 


THE   PERSONAL   EQUIPMENT     71 

speaking  world  with  the  Edinburgh  Review, 
the  old  Quarterly,  and  our  North  American 
Review  at  the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth 
century,  the  weekly  which  opened  between 
1830  and  i860  in  the  AthencBum,  the  Spec- 
tator, the  Saturday  Review  in  England,  and 
the  Independent,  the  Nation,  and  the  Out- 
look in  this  country,  the  magazine  which 
had  its  best  exemplar  in  Blackwood' s  in 
Great  Britain  and  here  in  Harper's,  are  all 
still  published,  but  their  own  public  weight 
and  general  demand  are  not  what  they  were. 
The  daily  has  gradually  invaded  each  of 
their  fields  and  presents  what  they  once  did 
to  larger  and  larger  areas  of  circulation. 
This  is  the  rising  tide  of  Democracy.  As 
yet,  it  shows  no  ebb  and  those  who  read  this 
page  in  adolescence,  when  they  have  had  the 
years  and  experience  of  the  writer  will  see 
dailies  as  much  improved  in  their  scope, 
method,  events,  and  illustration  as  the  daily 
of  to-day  outdoes  the  little  four  or  eight  page 
daily  on  which  I  "worked  with  Dana"  as 
one  of  the  Washington  correspondents  of 
the  New  York  Sun.  But  what  good  report- 
ing it  had ! 

Newspaper  life  is  necessarily  a  strain  on 


72  THE  NEWSPAPERMAN 

health.  The  morning  newspaperman  for 
years  of  his  active  Hfe  will  be  in  his  office 
until  one  A.  M.  always,  and  often  until  two. 
He  works  under  pressure.  He  is  in  his 
opening  years,  as  a  reporter,  necessarily  ir- 
regular in  his  meals.  This  irregularity  hits 
the  evening  newspaperman  who  has  as 
well  to  meet  the  pernicious  habit  of  early 
rising  in  a  community  whose  hours  of  rest 
and  relaxation  run  to  midnight.  News- 
paper life  is  much  more  irregular  than  it 
needs  to  be,  but  I  am  not  giving  advice  for 
the  few  perfect  and  generally  dull  souls  who 
are  orderly  in  their  twenties,  but  for  those 
who,  in  the  ginger  years,  bite  off  all  they 
can  chew  and  sometimes  more.  No  man 
and  no  woman  ought  to  turn  to  the  news- 
paper who  is  not  all  sound  and  well,  with  a 
strong  constitution,  having  enough  self- 
control  not  to  eat  twice  what  has  disagreed 
once.  The  habit  of  care  for  the  minor  pro- 
tection of  health  needs  to  be  cultivated. 
All  the  higher  callings  have  their  nervous 
strain,  but  the  newspaperman  rivals  the 
doctor  and  the  engineer  in  sudden  physical 
strains  and  demands  which  tax  all  a  man's 
strength. 


THE   PERSONAL   EQUIPMENT     73 

When  I  entered  the  city  room  of  the  New 
York  World  in  September,  1873,  nothing 
startled  me  more  than  the  appalHng  youth 
of  those  about  me,  of  my  superiors  in  par- 
ticular. The  appalling  youth  of  the  Ameri- 
can newspaper  ofifiice  comes  home  to  me 
even  more  in  1921  than  in  1873  and  its 
abiding  presence  is  adequate  evidence  of 
the  strain  of  the  newspaper.  Insurance 
occupation  tables  as  yet  throw  little  light 
on  the  mortality  of  the  calling,  but  with 
the  conspicuous  exceptions  of  Franklin  and 
Bryant,  the  notable  members  of  the  call- 
ing have  reached  no  great  age,  an  additional 
proof  that  the  vocation  requires  sound 
health  for  success. 

Address  is  the  foremost  quality  the  news- 
paperman needs  in  his  work.  It  is  a  griev- 
ous handicap  for  him  if  he  does  not  easily 
remember  faces  and  names.  To  have  this 
gift  is  a  perpetually  recurring  advantage. 
By  careful  inquiry,  checking  off  successive 
experiences,  I  found  that  Hiram  Calkins, 
conspicuous  in  New  York  State  for  his 
newspaper  knowledge  of  men  and  parties 
from  1855  to  1890,  knew  by  name  and 
countenance  at  least  50,000  individuals.    He 


74  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

could  scarcely  stir  in  thronged  ways  with- 
out meeting  some  one  he  knew  who  could 
give  him  useful  information  in  his  field. 
Through  a  large  part  of  the  work  of  a  news- 
paperman success  in  acquiring  news  turns 
on  a  capacity  to  awake  immediate  confi- 
dence. The  "good  mixer,"  the  man  or  wo- 
man who  can  lead  a  complete  stranger  to 
talk  freely,  profits  by  the  capacity. 

Mere  joy  in  writing,  mere  desire  to  write, 
by  itself,  plays  a  relatively  small  share  as 
an  indication  of  fitness  for  newspaper  work. 
Such  a  bent  is  usually  subjective.  It  looks 
to  self-expression.  It  is  a  turn  toward 
authorship  and  not  an  enthusiasm  for  news. 
The  man  who  has  this  passion  to  write 
only  too  often  makes  a  nuisance  of  himself 
in  the  newspaper.* 

Facility  and  rapidity  in  turning  out  good 
clean  copy  is  of  the  utmost  value  in  the  news- 
paper office.  The  typewriter  has  turned 
pen  and  pencil  out  of  the  newspaper.  All 
copy  has  to  be  typewritten.  A  boy  look- 
ing toward  the  newspaper  ought  to  be  using 

*  Journalism  as  a  training  and  preparation  for  literature 
is  discussed  in  a  succeeding  chapter:  "To  Literature 
Through  Journalism." 


THE   PERSONAL   EQUIPMENT    75 

the  typewriter  before  he  is  ten  years  of  age, 
the  earher  the  better.  Composition  on  the 
typewriter  should  be  as  easy,  as  exact,  and 
as  feHcitous  as  with  the  pen,  more  so.  The 
prime  deficiency  in  the  whole  teaching  of 
children  in  our  schools  is  that  they  are  al- 
lowed to  use  the  pen  when  they  ought  to 
begin  with  the  typewriter.  Mastery  of  the 
typewriter  should  be  secured  at  the  earliest 
moment.  Its  operation  becomes  as  uncon- 
scious as  the  pen.  In  training  for  the  news- 
paper and  in  the  newspaper  itself,  this  is  a 
continuing  asset.  A  man  ought  to  be  able 
to  turn  out  1,000  words  of  clean  copy  in  an 
hour.  The  expert  can  reach  twice  that. 
A  thousand  words  an  hour  is  close  to  the 
limit  of  speed  with  the  pen. 

The  habit  and  use  of  rapid  reading  is  as 
important  in  the  newspaper  calling  as  the 
swift  production  of  clean  copy.  A  skilled 
man  ought  to  be  able  to  give  a  good  ab- 
stract of  a  newspaper  column  of  leaded 
nonpareil  in  ninety  seconds.  He  should  be 
able  to  give  a  fair  outline  of  a  sixteen-page 
newspaper,  foreign  and  local  news,  the  mar- 
ket, editorial  page,  special  stories,  and  criti- 
cism in  twenty  minutes.     Ten  minutes  more 


76  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

should  give  him  all  the  small  stuff  and  the 
run  of  the  advertising.  No  beginner  can  do 
this,  but  he  can  begin  training  himself. 
There  is  no  better  specific  preparation  for 
service  on  a  particular  paper  than  reading 
its  issues  thoroughly  for  three  months  before. 
The  neophyte  will  miss  much;  but  he  will 
also  gain  much.  Ability  to  read  fast,  accur- 
ately, and  retentiously  is  not  a  widely  dif- 
fused gift.  Some  never  gain  it.  Richard 
Watson  Gilder,  editor  of  the  Century  for 
many  years,  with  ideal  qualification,  said 
that  Theodore  Roosevelt  and  a  newspaper 
worker  were  the  two  swiftest  readers  he  had 
ever  known,  in  the  double  test  of  covering 
ground  and  giving  an  adequate  summary. 
For  Roosevelt  his  amazing  acquirement  of 
knowledge  very  largely  turned  on  his  patient 
effort,  from  early  in  life,  to  read  rapidly. 

Any  boy  who  has  a  real  ambition  for  the 
newspaper  cannot  do  better  than  begin  train- 
ing himself  in  swift,  attentive  reading.  A 
large  part  of  the  human  race  puts  its  brains 
to  bed  when  it  begins  to  read  a  book,  and 
those  of  this  mindless  group  think  of  every- 
thing but  the  news  in  a  newspaper  when 
they  are  reading  it.     This  is  waste,  folly,  and 


THE   PERSONAL  EQUIPMENT    -]-] 

abuse  of  all  the  blessings  of  Cadmus,  Guten- 
berg, Richard  Hoe,  and  Merganthaler,  bene- 
factors all. 

A  swift,  sound  eye  is  needed,  but  not  nec- 
essary, to  swift,  intelligent,  adhesive  reading. 
Henry  Watterson,  blessings  on  him,  had  but 
one  eye,  it  had  a  focal  reach  of  about  an  inch, 
and  yet  he  would  shuck  the  news  and  sense 
out  of  a  newspaper  as  quick  as  any  journalist 
living.  Joseph  Pulitzer,  whose  eyes,  alas, 
finally  failed  him,  passed  newspapers  In  four 
tongues  through  his  mind,  as  the  unbound 
sheaves  are  drawn  through  the  great  giant 
thresher,  leaving  the  wheat  behind. 

By  amazing  resolution  and  the  use  of 
highly  trained  assistance  he  continued  his 
newspaper  reading  and  knowledge  after  sight 
was  gone.  A  journalist  lives  by  his  eyes. 
Weakness  there  is  sure  to  appear.  No  man 
ought  to  think  of  entering  on  newspaper 
work  without  having  his  eyes  thoroughly  ex- 
amined by  a  competent  ophthalmologist.  A 
failure  to  do  this  often  brings  on  nervous  de- 
pression, serious  neurasthenia,  indigestion, 
premature  breakdown  and,  in  some  cases, 
permanently  Impaired  eyesight. 

The  studies  of  the  journalist  are  dealt  with 


78  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

in  the  chapter  on  Preparation,  but  before 
formal  preparation,  aside  from  the  careful 
husbanding  of  physical  powers  and  the  sug- 
gestions already  made,  the  personal  ability 
and  equipment  of  the  journalist  needs  to  be 
supplemented  by  the  assiduous  reading  of 
books.  The  great  journalists  have  been  con- 
suming readers.  They  read  the  newspaper 
in  and  out  of  season,  and  they  read  the 
solid  informing  books ;  not  the  single-volume 
things.  The  boy  that  yearns  for  the  news- 
paper will  read  six  or  seven  volume  books 
that  have  the  wide  horizon  and  multifarious 
knowledge  which  gives  perspective  to  the 
mind  through  life.  This  reading  will  be  of 
no  use,  however,  unless  a  man  has  a  nose 
for  news  and  the  sensing  mind  which  uses 
knowledge  but  never  displays  it. 

The  reference  habit  needs  to  be  begun 
early.  Pass  no  word,  name,  place,  or  event 
without  getting  it  into  its  particular  place. 
Do  this  with  a  Century  Dictionary,  steadily, 
habitually,  continually,  and  you  will  pour 
the  fertilizing  stream  over  your  mind  like 
the  waters  of  Old  Nile,  to  furnish  harvests 
for  the  future  and  the  many. 

Sustained  attention  which  sees  all,  watches 


THE   PERSONAL  EQUIPMENT    79 

each,  and  notes  every  incident  as  it  comes 
some  have  by  nature,  all  can  acquire,  as 
equipment.  Once  acquired,  there  is  no  part 
of  the  multifarious  work  of  the  newspaper 
which  is  not  enriched  by  it  in  years  to  come. 
The  final  supreme  gift  of  the  journalist  is 
vision.  The  greater  gods  of  the  calling  have 
all  had  this  gift.  They  saw  the  battle  from 
afar  and  caught  victory  with  the  eye  of 
assured  faith.  James  Gordon  Bennett,  the 
elder,  deserved  the  severe  condemnation  of 
his  own  day,  but  even  he  had  the  vision  of 
the  many  knowing  what  only  the  few  had 
before  possessed.  Men  of  a  wider  range  and 
a  loftier  prospect  saw  an  ampler  vision,  and 
by  the  vision  splendid  were  on  their  way 
attended,  nor  let  it  fade  to  the  light  of  com- 
mon day.  So  Franklin  saw  the  triumph  of 
democracy,  and  Cobbett  the  fall  of  privilege. 
The  vision  cometh  not  with  observation.  It 
rests  on  supreme  faith  in  the  great  tide  of 
events,  in  the  infallibility  of  the  advance,  in 
the  certain  triumph  of  the  greater  good, 
though  all  the  power  of  hell  be  arrayed 
against  it.  This  has  supported  newspaper- 
men in  the  pillory  and  given  strength  to  face 
death  as  they  fought  in  the  gates  of  the  peo- 


8o  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

pie  with  the  aHen  enemies  of  the  light, 
through  long  years  to  serve  a  gainsaying 
generation  and  see  triumph  at  last. 

This  cometh  only  as  men  have  early 
sought  the  vision,  waited  for  it  through  years 
and  never  doubted  the  larger  hope  and  the 
overarching  Providence  which  builds  the 
shrine  of  the  diviner  future.  With  this  all 
things  are  possible.  Without  this  the  jour- 
nalist but  wanders  in  a  changing  show,  chaf- 
fers in  the  market-place,  and  finds  things  new 
and  old  to  no  purpose  and  no  result.  Not  in 
this  spirit  did  He  speak  who  saw  afar  the 
newspaper  day  when  all  things  secret  should 
be  revealed  and  the  housetop  should  pro- 
claim what  had  been  said  as  the  jealous 
secret  of  the  inner  chambers  of  privilege. 


V 

LETTERS  AND  THE  NEWSPAPER 

As  author  and  newspaperman  are  or  may 
be  both  paid  for  what  they  write  and  pub- 
lish, by  a  natural  confusion  of  thought  and 
experience  many  men  and  women  come  to 
the  market  gate  of  the  newspaper  with  the 
wares  of  the  author. 

They  rarely  sell  them.  Many  books  have 
been  made  from  the  columns  of  the  news- 
paper. Arnold's  Friendship' s  Garland,  Rob- 
inson Crusoe,  and  Kipling's  sketches  are  not 
alone  as  veritable  literature  dug  out  of  the 
newspaper.  Most  newspaper  stuff  when  it 
appears  in  a  book  reads  rather  thin.  The 
test  is  different;  the  values  differ.  The 
newspaper  was  wanted  that  day  and  no 
other.     Literature  is  for  all  time. 

The  newspaper  at  the  same  time  has  been 
sought  by  many  men  of  letters,  who  after  a 
season  went  to  their  own  place,  and  a  large 
number  of  men,  who  seek  the  daily,  in  their 
utmost  souls  want  to  write  books.     They 

8i 


82  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

are  usually  disappointed.  Nothing  is  so 
fatal  to  the  selected  arts  as  the  companion- 
ship of  their  democratic  substitutes.  The 
jealous  muse  might  brook  a  rival,  but  she 
will  not  accept  a  mere  substitute.  Hugh 
Miller  points  out  in  his  Schools  and  School 
Masters  nothing  is  worse  for  the  possible 
painter  than  to  take  to  sign  painting,  the 
aspiring  sculptor  to  take  to  stone-cutting,  or 
the  poet  to  write  newspaper  verse.  If  a 
man  is  called  to  verse,  he  had  better  write 
it  and  starve  instead  of  going  half-way  and 
getting  nowhere.  Lowell  said  to  me  that 
the  mistake  of  his  life  was  to  compromise 
on  teaching  literature  instead  of  writing 
verse.  "If  I  had  only  kept  to  that,"  said 
he,  with  a  look  of  infinite  sorrow  and  dis- 
appointment, "I  might  have  done  some- 
thing." Richard  Watson  Gilder  was  in  the 
habit  of  saying  that  English  poets  were  wiser 
than  American  in  keeping  at  all  costs  to  their 
one  task,  instead  of  tilling  many  fields.  I 
am  not  myself  quite  persuaded  that  this 
was  the  only  difference  between  English  and 
American  poets.  Walt  Whitman  told  me 
that  he  was  unable  to  write  until  he  left  the 
newspaper  and  all  its  works,  daily,  weekly, 


LETTERS   AND    NEWSPAPER     83 

and  monthly.  Even  then  he  said,  "the  best 
thing  that  happened  to  me  was  that  all  my 
articles  were  rejected.  If  anybody  had  ac- 
cepted any  articles,  even  one''  (with  great 
emphasis)  "I  would  have  been  lost.  I 
would  have  begun  to  write  like  that,  for  I 
needed  the  money  cruelly.  But  as  they  re- 
jected all  and  I  could  not  sell  anything.  I 
wrote  to  satisfy  myself  alone."  And  so 
Leaves  of  Grass  became  meadow  and  pasture 
of  a  distant  future. 

Crome,  "old  Crome,"  is  at  least  one  ex- 
ample of  a  painter  who  took  to  coach- 
painting  and  became  a  great  painter.  Now 
in  the  centennial  of  his  death  he  looms  high 
and  afar,  if  not  the  greatest  of  English  land- 
scape-painters, certainly  one  of  the  greatest. 
Every  square  inch  of  his  canvas  tells  the 
story  of  the  artificer  who  had  learned  to 
spread  paint  with  amazing,  even  skill  before 
he  became  a  painter;  but,  after  all,  but  too 
many  painters  never  do  anything  but  spread 
paint.  So  in  letters  there  are  those  whom 
the  apprenticeship  of  the  newspaper  made 
craftsmen  before  the  inspiration  of  letters 
lifted  them  into  literature.  George  Bernard 
Shaw  is  a  case  in  point. 


84  THE  NEWSPAPERMAN 

But  in  the  main  the  newspaper  kills  letters 
in  a  man.  My  uniform  advice  to  those 
whose  work  shows  some  distant  touch  of  the 
divine  has  been  that  it  was  better  to  starve 
oneself  than  one's  muse.  Nobody  has  ac- 
cepted this  advice,  but  some  tried  to  do  both 
and  never  proved  either  good  newspapermen 
or  good  men  of  letters.  The  magazine  is 
sometimes  a  sort  of  cold  frame  in  which  the 
sprigs  of  genius  can  be  started,  potted  out, 
and  kept  safe  from  frost.  At  least  the  poet 
himself  can  be ;  his  poems  are  apt  to  be  a  bit 
frost-bitten.  Magazine  editors  are  always 
saying  that  they  receive  a  great  deal  of 
poetry,  but  they  print  am.azingly  little. 
The  market  for  verse,  however,  is  rising. 
Some  poets  pay  an  income  tax  in  this  coun- 
try and  many  in  England,  but  the  bottom 
notch,  the  point  where  the  poet's  income 
escapes  a  tax  is  in  England  under  $750  a 
year  for  bachelors. 

In  two  fields  the  newspaper  is  of  value  to 
the  author.  Newspaper  labor  and  life,  its 
limitless  contact  with  the  moving  show,  its 
new  knowledge  of  men,  women,  and  the 
haps  and  hazards  of  their  contact,  its  experi- 
ence of  the  actual  is  of  unquestionable  value 


LETTERS   AND   NEWSPAPER     85 

to  the  writer  of  fiction.  In  my  heart  of 
hearts  I  have  always  believed  that  two  or 
three  years  as  a  reporter  would  have  made 
a  man  of  Henry  James.  A  very  wide  range 
of  novelists  have  been  newspapermen — 
Dickens,  Thackeray,  Meredith,  Howells, 
Kipling,  Davis,  Poole,  Sinclair,  Dreiser,  and 
Fanny  Hurst  all  sat  in  to  the  newspaper 
game.  There  are  many  more,  and  the  man 
who  has  himself  been  a  reporter,  handled 
copy,  and  smelled  both  manifold  and  proofs 
is  perpetually  catching  the  scent  of  both  in 
modern  fiction.  There  was  truth  in  Zola's 
declaration — he  also  lived  in  our  Arcadia — 
that  there  is  no  place  in  which  to  form  style 
as  on  the  unyielding  anvil  of  the  newspaper 
under  the  inexorable  hammer  of  events. 
The  newspaper  gives  something  to  fiction 
nothing  else  does.  Reality,  crass  fact,  the 
sense  of  exact  length,  words  written  to  mea- 
sure, concinnity,  the  very  accent  of  the  dia- 
lect of  callings,  places,  characters,  and  catas- 
trophes. 

For  fiction  and  fiction  first,  therefore,  the 
newspaper  has  its  value.  The  poet,  like  the 
silkworm,  must  spin  his  own  silken  cord. 
Naught  can  give  him  local  color  or  inspira- 


86  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

tion  but  his  own  personal  experience.  In 
history-writing  journahsm  Is  a  good  school. 
Gibbon's  brief  experience  In  the  Hampshire 
militia  helped  him  to  catch  the  tread  of  the 
Roman  legion  across  the  span  of  a  thousand 
years.  No  one  but  a  newspaperman,  Justin 
McCarthy,  could  have  written  the  History 
of  Our  Own  Time.  Only  a  man  trained  in 
writing  about  people  could  have  drawn 
Strachey's  marvellous  and  misleading  por- 
trait of  Queen  Victoria.  Much  of  Matthew 
Arnold's  first  criticism  was  written  for  a 
daily,  the  Pall  Mall  Gazette,  but  most  of  It 
for  the  more  leisurely  atmosphere  of  a  maga- 
zine. When  he  came  to  this  country  In  1885, 
he  had  never  received  over  £20  for  a  maga- 
zine article. 

No  sharp  dividing  line  can  be  drawn  In 
these  matters.  Isolated  examples  count  for 
little.  The  radical  difiference  lies  not  in  form 
but  in  purpose,  means,  and  end.  By  nature 
and  by  choice,  to  repeat,  this  man  prefers 
100,000  readers  In  a  day  and  that  man  1,000 
readers  each  year  for  a  hundred  years  and 
then  oblivion,  save  in  the  history  of  litera- 
ture. This  is  particularly  true  of  minor 
poets,  who  are  dug  up  like  mummies  for  ex- 


LETTERS  AND   NEWSPAPER     87 

hibltion  and  a  label.  Each  man  gets  what 
he  wants.  Each  is  using  the  tool  of  writing 
(his  means)  for  a  different  end  and  purpose. 
It  is  foolish  to  try  to  make  comparisons  and 
establish  a  standard  of  relation.  You  can- 
not add  bushels  and  pounds,  pints  and 
ounces. 

The  wise  and  only  plan  is  to  understand 
clearly  this  gap  and  gulf  between  the  two, 
and  make  a  choice  accordingly.  Many 
books  are  as  ephemeral  as  the  newspaper. 
Poor  Richard  is  none  the  less  a  classic  be- 
cause it  first  appeared  in  periodical  form. 
But  those  who  stand  at  the  threshold  need 
to  be  open-eyed.  There  is  a  chance,  though 
a  minutely  small  chance,  that  the  newspaper 
will  make  known  an  author  whose  name  the 
world  will  not  willingly  let  die.  O.  Henry 
is  an  example.  I  know  no  one  whose  work 
was  appearing  in  The  Sun  at  the  same  time 
that  his  stories  appeared  who  saw  they  were 
fiction  of  a  high  and  final  order.  Full  well, 
I  know  I  did  not.  "Good  stufT"  I  thought 
it;  but  if  its  worth  was  known  and  seen,  its 
height  was  taken  by  none.  Like  instances 
are  so  few,  taking  the  entire  range  of  the 
newspaper  and  measuring  its  vast  torrent  of 


88  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

print,  that  the  judicious  course  for  the  be- 
ginner is  to  dredge  your  soul  until  you  reach 
rock  bottom.  The  newspaper  fight  is  on  all 
the  time.  There  are  blows  to  give  and  take ; 
causes  to  support,  to  see  go  to  victory  or  to 
defeat,  no  share  of  newspaper  work  but 
touches  the  quick  of  the  current  day.  For 
some  this  call  is  irresistible;  but  such  need 
to  see  also  that  their  work  will  be  buried  in 
the  files,  irrecoverable  there.  It  will  have 
no  hereafter.  It  will  pass  with  the  using. 
The  single  solitary  poem,  if  it  be  verse  and 
not  mere  versification,  will  last,  as  has  the 
anonymous  Greek  epigram  scrawled  by  a 
passing  traveller  on  the  statue  of  Memnon 
at  Thebes,  which  has  outlived  God,  priest, 
and  king. 

Choose  ye  therefore  this  day  whom  ye 
will  serve.  Serve  two  masters  ye  cannot. 
Either  turn  to  the  service  of  the  great  mul- 
titude and,  also,  deceive  not  yourself,  the 
immediate  pay  and  pelf  which  yields  the 
larger  support;  or  work  alone  and  apart, 
careless  of  the  present  and  careful  only  of 
a  future,  no  line  you  write  may  even  see. 
Nor  is  it  an  easy  life  to  pay  your  bills  in 
this   century   and    wait   for   your   fame   in 


LETTERS  AND    NEWSPAPER     89 

another.  But  let  there  be  no  repining. 
See  the  end  from  the  beginning.  One  more 
forgotten  book  is  really  little  more  than 
unread  files. 

Ignorance  renders  this  decision  difficult 
for  serious  youth,  and  nothing  is  more  seri- 
ous than  youth.  Age  is  trivial  and  light- 
headed by  the  solemn  awakening  of  the  con- 
scious mind.  The  sound  of  the  battle  from 
afar,  the  voice  of  the  captains,  and  the  shout- 
ing seen  and  heard  not  from  the  towers  of 
the  Elders  of  Troy  but  from  the  open 
porches  of  study  trod  between  the  years  of 
fifteen  and  twenty-five,  give  the  solemnest 
hours- of  life.  In  this  hour,  aid  and  direction 
will  be  gained  by  patiently  finding  out  what 
the  current  gods  and  near  gods  of  current 
youth  have  themselves  done  in  the  early 
years.  For  some,  if  not  all  of  those  of  the 
last  one  hundred  years,  it  is  possible  to  find 
out  what  work  was  done  by  them  in  the 
early  years,  their  first  essays,  from,  let  us 
say,  eighteen  to  twenty-five  or  thirty.  This 
is  a  steadying  experience.  In  my  day  one 
asked,  Wliat  was  Macaulay  doing  at  college  ? 
What  had  Keats,  Shelley,  and  Tennyson 
written  before  twenty-five  ?     What  was  the 


90  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

Oxford  and  Cambridge  verse  of  those  in  the 
mid-heaven  of  fame  in  the  'seventies  ?  What 
was  the  early  market-seeking  work  of  Car- 
lyle,  Dickens,  and  George  EHot  ?  The  Amer- 
ican names  were  few  and  far  to  seek,  but 
Bryant's  first  work,  Longfellow's,  Whittier's, 
and  Lowell's  could  be  had,  and  the  early 
pages  of  the  North  American  Review  had 
their  lesson  of  work  early  done.  The  prize 
poems  of  Oxford  and  Cambridge  are  all 
accessible  in  print  and  most  useful  for  the 
young  writer  in  order  to  measure  his  youth- 
ful work  against  the  early  output  of  those 
who  later  attained.  College  periodicals  fur- 
nish similar  comparisons  in  this  countr>^; 
but,  save  in  fugitive  verse,  the  work  of  the 
college  future  great  has  not  been  collated 
and  published  here  as  in  England. 

Such  search  is  a  steadying  experience.  It 
has  its  illusions  In  the  reflected  glory  shed 
on  early  work  by  later  achievement,  but  it  Is 
better  than  nothing.  Better  much  than  the 
vague  advice  of  seniors,  for  between  Dives 
Senior  and  the  youth  In  Abraham's  bosom 
a  great  gulf  is  fixed.  Any  writing  boy  or 
girl  (pretty  much  every  one  nowadays  gets 
into  print  in  high  school  and  college)  who 


LETTERS   AND    NEWSPAPER     91 

enters  on  this  sober  and  disillusioning  com- 
parison will  find  that  it  clears  the  prospect. 
It  gives  standards  of  comparison.  You 
learn  what  real  ability  was  like  when  caught 
young  and  immature.  You  learn,  too,  that 
there  are  still  lower  deeps  of  callow  compo- 
sition and  a  rawer  green  immaturity  in 
your  own  work  and  that  of  your  fellows. 
At  one  point,  one  hates  to  make  the  confes- 
sion, the  comparison  is  misleading  because 
the  task  of  teaching  youth  to  write  was  and 
Is  done  so  much  better  in  the  English  univer- 
sities than  in  our  colleges.  I  still  carry  the 
smart  of  the  discovery  that  in  an  inter- 
change of  letters  between  Oxford  and  Har- 
vard rowing  men,  the  former  did  ten  lines 
of  print — the  letters  were  in  the  newspapers 
— so  much  better  than  the  American  oars- 
men. This  is  still  true  and  has  to  be  re- 
membered. 

I  say  all  this  because  I  have  seen  such 
grievous  and  needless  waste  in  the  precious 
years  of  the  twenties  and  sometimes  in  the 
thirties  by  those  who  tried  to  force  literary 
wares  on  a  reluctant  market.  Many  great 
have  had  their  work  rejected,  but  all  re- 
jected are  not  great.     The  waste  of  which  I 


92 


THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 


speak  is  not  merely  of  time.  The  man  hunt- 
ing a  market  leads  an  irregular  life.  His 
time  is  not  ordered  and  in  demand.  With 
few  are  habits  of  steady  work  maintained. 
Eating  your  heart  is  not  a  healthy  diet. 
Fortunately  the  small  magazine,  the  vogue 
of  the  short  story,  and  the  market  demand 
for  verse  give  longer  commons  to  the  muses 
than  in  the  past,  but  their  sheets  are  as 
scant  as  ever  on  their  restless  beds. 


VI 
NEWSPAPER  ENGLISH* 

Bergdoll  "got  what  was  coming  to 
him,"  said  the  Philadelphia  Public  Ledger  in 
an  editorial  and  straightway  apologized  for 
the  phrase.  Unnecessary  !  The  phrase  was 
good  English,  good  newspaper  English. 
John  Dewey  is  a  philosopher  foremost  in 
our  day.  Few  living,  I  think  none,  have 
more  affected  teaching  for  the  better.  The 
world  of  thought  is  his  debtor;  not  the 
world  of  action.  In  his  last  article  he  says 
of  the  war:  "Most  of  the  talk  about  jus- 
tice and  self-determination  was  bunk."  He 
would  not  and  should  not  apologize  over 
the  last  word;  though  the  future  may  chal- 
lenge his  utterance.  A  prophet  is  not  with- 
out wisdom,  save  on  his  own  time. 

Over  the  use  of  "bunk"  in  an  editorial 
many  a  good  leader-writer  would  have  a 
creepy  distrust.  We  shun  crisp  diction, 
fresh  from  the  people.     So  all  speech  began. 

*  Reprinted  by  courtesy  of  the  North  American  Review, 
October,  1920. 

93 


94  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

When  a  tongue  ceases  to  spawn  new  words, 
fresh  phrases,  novel  images;  thought  and 
progress  stop  also.  Keats  added  over  one 
hundred  and  fifty  new  words  to  the  vocabu- 
lary of  verse.  In  Alice's  Adventures  in 
Wonderland  and  its  sequel  Lewis  Carroll 
(Charles  L.  Dodgson)  added  at  least  two- 
score.  These  are  of  imagination  all  com- 
pact. New  thought ;  new  words.  The  closer 
to  daily  life  and  speech  is  the  writer's  pen 
or  the  click  of  the  typewriter  keys,  the  more 
active,  the  more  efficient,  the  more  effective 
is  the  utterance  of  the  writer  and  the  life  of 
the  people.  So  long  as  accepted  and  ac- 
ceptable writing  accepts  and  shares  the  daily 
changes  of  the  vocabulary  of  the  market- 
place, so  long  as  both  live  and  move  and 
have  their  being  in  the  sun  of  passion,  action, 
and  achievement,  the  more  lasting,  pungent, 
and  penetrating  is  the  literature  of  the 
period. 

The  reverse  has  been  but  too  often  tried. 
We  know  through  human  experience  long 
and  wide  what  comes  to  land  and  people 
when  the  writer's  pen  separates  from  the 
speech  of  the  soil  and  of  the  current  day. 
These  fossils  of  literature  are  built  into  the 


NEWSPAPER   ENGLISH  95 

dead  annals  of  the  history  of  many  lands  and 
letters  also.  They  exist  at  the  present  time 
in  the  mummied  tongues  of  to-day. 

Invasion  or  Isolation,  new  contacts  with 
foreign  trade  or  internal  development,  bring 
into  being  at  some  spot  a  new  language. 
Shock  or  struggle  within  or  without,  the  in- 
spiration of  a  new  faith  or  a  new  civilization, 
straightway  add  one  more  to  the  world's 
literature.  Happy  he  who  writes  in  a 
tongue  untouched,  with  diction  unused  and 
words  unsullied,  with  the  bloom  and  sharp 
edge  of  fresh-minted  coin.  Out  of  these 
conditions  came  Mohammed's  Koran,  fount 
and  foundation  of  a  new  faith  and  a  new 
literature  In  a  new  tongue,  In  which  before 
few  had  said  aught  of  note  save  seven  short 
poems,  as  long  as  "  Lycidas  "  or  "  Venus  and 
Adonis."  The  best  of  the  Koran  matches  any 
creative  work  in  the  same  field,  the  field  of 
Job,  Hebrew  prophecy,  and  Psalms  at  their 
best.  This  one  book,  two-thirds  as  large  as 
the  New  Testament,  created  a  new  religion, 
a  new  code,  a  new  philosophy  of  thought 
and  action,  a  new  empire,  new  history,  unto 
this  present  hour. 

"God  gave  the  book  to  those  who  love 


96  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

Him,"  said  Mohammed.  So  of  all  great 
letters  and  so  of  the  newspaper  daily,  dear 
in  making  and  reading  to  those  who  desire 
morning  and  evening  to  know  the  day's  di- 
vine event,  newly  made.  But  all  the  varied 
melange  of  the  Koran,  lofty  verse,  philoso- 
phy, legislation,  folk-lore,  tales  of  the  mar- 
ket, legends,  Rabbinical  and  Christian,  half 
understood,  these  for  all  the  centuries  to 
come  were  made  the  sole,  sufhcient,  and  final 
guide  in  Arabic  on  words,  meanings,  phras- 
ing, sentencing,  locutions,  paradigms,  syn- 
tax, and  rhetoric.  All  writers,  save  the 
happy  "large  few  stars"  that  create  a  new 
literature,  are  oppressed  with  authority  as 
to  words,  sentences,  subjects,  and  method. 
We  are  always  looking  back  instead  of  for- 
ward to  see  how  the  man  who  is  dead  did  it. 
Writers  carry  through  life  the  uneasy  con- 
sciousness that  somewhere,  somewhen,  some- 
how, there  is  a  formula.  Authority  and 
precedent  have  their  value  to  society.  Even 
there,  they  do  harm.  To  the  writer  they 
are  fatal.  A  school  of  journalism  swarms 
with  young  men  and  women  who  expect  to 
be  shown  how  to  write.  It  is  the  business  of 
the  school  to  fill  them  with  knowledge,  to 


NEWSPAPER   ENGLISH  97 

inspire  them  with  principle,  to  force  them  to 
read  the  great  in  letters  and  then  put 
the  young  cubs  on  the  trail  of  news  and 
opinion  with  technical  knowledge  of  "edit- 
ing" broadly  considered.  The  only  thing 
certain  about  the  best  "newspaper  story"  of 
yesterday  is  that  it  is  not  the  best  way  for 
to-morrow.  It  is  easy  in  teaching  writing 
to  correct  grammar,  point  out  solecisms, 
misused  words,  an  awkward  construction, 
an  ill  arrangement;  but  how  to  write  well 
and  effectively,  a  man  must  learn  for  him- 
self by  endless  toil,  with  now  and  then  a 
hint  as  to  a  happy  phrase  by  one  who  writes 
better.  Style  is  half  imitation,  half  crea- 
tion. 

The  open  proof  of  this  is  the  gigantic  ex- 
periment of  the  Arab  and  Moslem  world  in 
taking  a  work,  great  In  the  higher  arts  of 
expression  In  prose  and  verse,  which  remade 
half  the  old  Roman  world  and  created  anew 
In  religion,  In  philosophy,  in  rule,  in  archi- 
tecture, in  all  the  decorative  arts,  and  in 
twelve  centuries  of  history,  and  making  the 
usage  of  this  book  the  rule  of  the  writer  for 
all  time  in  Arabic  and  in  associated  tongues, 
like  Persian  and  Turkish.     Those  who  ad- 


98  THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

venture  on  prose  or  in  verse  In  any  of  these 
tongues,  but  most  of  all  in  Arabic,  are  pro- 
foundly influenced  and  controlled  by  the  in- 
exorable tradition  and  standard  of  the  Koran 
and  the  seven  poems  I  have  mentioned,  the 
Moallakat,  and  in  general  by  the  words  and 
usage  of  the  Prophet  and  the  first  century 
after  him. 

The  spoken  tongue  of  Arabic  went  the 
way  of  all  the  languages  of  the  earth.  It 
developed  racy  and  idiomatic  dialects.  They 
differed  in  pronunciation,  but  less  than  most 
offshoots  from  a  central  tongue.  They  are 
often  cited  as  mutually  incomprehensible  to 
each  other.  This  is  an  error.  I  have  talked 
with  men  speaking  these  dialects  from  the 
Tigris  to  the  Atlantic,  from  the  flank  of  the 
South  slope  of  the  Taurus  to  Yemen  in 
South  Arabia. 

These  Arab  dialects  have  a  seductive  folk- 
lore and  folk-song.  They  have  their  verse 
and  their  prose.  They  have  absorbed  for- 
eign words.  They  have  modified  paradigm 
and  syntax.  They  meet  all  the  needs  of  the 
common  day.  But  no  one  accepts  these 
tongues  for  literature.  If  one  Is  to  write 
verse  that  commands  attention  and  gives 


NEWSPAPER   ENGLISH  99 

him  a  place  In  letters,  he  turns  to  the  Arabic 
of  thirteen  centuries  ago.  If  he  writes  prose 
he  must  turn  to  the  ancient  vocabulary  of 
the  past.  All  that  has  come  to  the  tongue 
since  that  period  must  be  excluded.  Even 
an  editorial  in  a  daily  Arabic  paper  is  apt 
to  use  the  diction  of  the  past. 

So  our  Hellenic  friends  have  deprived  the 
plain  man  and  woman  in  Greece  of  the  read- 
ing of  the  New  Testament  in  a  tongue  under- 
standed  of  the  people  by  making  it  a  penal 
offense  to  sell  or  give  away  a  copy  of  the 
New  Testament  in  Romaic  or  modern 
Greek,  because  ancient  Greek  is  the  tongue 
of  Greece.  Nothing  must  be  done  to  break 
this  fiction.  Greek  editors  and  Greek  au- 
thors painfully  use  in  its  old  form  a  tongue 
that  has  gone  through  a  thousand  years  of 
change.  More  ancient  Greek  words  are  used 
now,  more  ancient  forms;  but  the  practical 
result  is  that  Greece  has  two  tongues,  one 
used  by  the  educated,  modelled  on  a  dead 
language,  and  the  tongue  used  by  the  great 
mass  as  their  day-by-day  speech. 

In  a  reverse  effort  Spanish  literature  has 
tried  to  impose  on  Catalonia  the  classic  Cas- 
tilian,  the  tongue  of  Cervantes  and  Ibanez, 


100        THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

with  a  similar  dislocation  between  the  lan- 
guage of  books  and  the  speech  of  daily  life. 
In  Greece  a  strong  party  fights  for  Romaic, 
modern  Greek,  and  are  held  traitors  to  Hel- 
lenic tradition  just  as  the  Catalans,  who 
have  revived  the  use  in  letters  of  an  ancient 
and  effective  tongue,  are  stigmatized  as  se- 
cessionists, false  to  the  unity  of  Spain, 
though  in  Catalonia  the  familiar  speech  is 
older  than  Castilian  Spanish. 

Because  China  is  older  the  problem  there 
is  more  complex.  Confucius  and  the  earlier 
classics  wrote  in  the  tongue  they  used  daily. 
This  became  the  tongue  of  letters.  The  lan- 
guage of  the  mass  in  nearly  three  thousand 
years  has  changed  to  a  local  patois,  unintelli- 
gible from  province  to  province.  While  the 
words  have  changed,  the  characters  that  rep- 
resent them  are  unchanged.  Letters  and 
official  life  keep  the  tongue  of  the  past,  un- 
intelligible to  the  many.  This  thin  film 
stretches  over  the  great  empire,  the  only 
means  of  communication.  Below  are  the 
vast  millions  with  no  common  medium. 
This  palsies  progress  and  creates  impenetra- 
ble social  non-conductors  between  the  masses 
of  each   of   the   provinces.     One   more   old 


NEWSPAPER   ENGLISH         loi 

tongue  which  prevents  any  common  move- 
ment, and  must  for  years  to  come  make  a 
real  union  of  the  Chinese  people  as  a  whole 
impossible  while  current  "revolutions"  are 
the  work  of  the  very  few  literate. 

Always  in  these  cases  and  many  similar 
among  ancient  tongues  that  began  litera- 
ture, written  or  unwritten,  these  phenomena 
occur  and  recur  and  the  same  results  follow 
— unchanged  and  ancient  tongues  used  by 
the  learned  few,  while  the  speech  of  the 
many  divides  and  changes  until  the  speech 
of  the  past  and  of  the  priestly  and  scholared 
few  stands  apart.  Why  have  the  English- 
speaking  peoples  kept  together,  while  other 
races  are  divided  by  dialects?  To-day  we 
are  160,000,000  strong,  and  we  can  under- 
stand each  other  from  the  pines  and  oaks  of 
the  Orkneys,  across  America  to  the  pines  and 
palms  of  New  Zealand. 

In  all  the  tongues  I  have  marshalled  there 
came  a  period  of  the  greater  letters.  Such 
periods  are  few.  We  complain  of  current 
literary  mediocrity.  This  is  the  rule.  A 
literary  period  which  inspires  and  commands 
a  tongue  and  a  race  is  of  the  rarest.  The 
English-speaking  race  has  had  but  one,  from 


102         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

the  first  play  of  Shakespeare  in  1591  to  the 
close  of  "  Paradise  Lost "  in  1665.  Take  out 
King  James's  version  of  the  Bible,  Shake- 
speare, Milton,  and  Bacon — what  is  left  of 
leadership  in  the  prose  and  verse  of  the  Eng- 
lishry  in  world  letters?  Yet  the  race  has 
had  its  writers  for  a  thousand  years  and  fif- 
teen, from  the  defeat  of  the  Danes  to  the 
defeat  of  the  Germans.  A  span  of  eighty 
years  takes  us  from  ^Eschylus  to  Plato,  from 
Catullus  to  Virgil.  Take  these  periods, 
Dante  and  Homer,  out  of  European  letters 
and  what  is  left  ?  Drum  and  fife,  tinkling 
brass  and  sounding  cymbal,  for  the  march 
of  lesser  men  in  the  pageant  of  letters. 

These  periods  of  inspiration  come  with 
some  one  of  the  mightier  literatures  or  of  the 
world  religions.  No  great  faith  has  won  its 
place  without  the  gift  of  expression  and  of 
utterance.  Even  Christianity  has  only  pros- 
pered as  some  great  translation  gave  its 
message.  Now  that  at  last  we  know  out  of 
what  manner  of  substance  the  members  of 
the  New  Testament  were  fashioned  together, 
we  see  with  what  simple  but  surpassing  effect 
its  brief  annals  are  presented  in  the  Greek  of 
the  many  and  not  of  the  few,  as  was  meet 


NEWSPAPER   ENGLISH         103 

with  a  message  heard  gladly  by  the  common 
people.  When  these  fruitful  and  teeming 
moments  come,  big  with  the  future  of  a  new 
tongue,  a  new  literature,  and  a  new  faith,  all 
men,  all  races  have  desired  to  build  three 
tabernacles  on  this  Mount  of  Transfigura- 
tion and  abide  in  them,  hearing  these  voices 
forever.  Every  successive  writer  yearns  to 
write  in  this  dialect  with  this  vocabulary, 
and  the  foolish  learned  desire  and  command 
that  he  shall. 

But  while  the  books  of  the  iew,  be  they 
literature  or  only  just  writing,  change  not, 
the  tongue  of  the  mass  can  be  held  in  no 
such  silken  leading-strings.  No  one  can  put 
a  hook  into  the  nose  of  that  leviathan  of 
language,  the  utterance  of  the  many.  Every 
generation  it  changes.  New  words  come  in. 
Old  words  go  out.  Events  bear  new  words. 
A  great  war  is  as  good  as  the  publication  of 
a  new  glossary.  Conquerors  or  slaves  come 
in,  it  matters  not  which.  They  bring  their 
words  with  them.  Accents  move  forward 
or  backward,  under  some  subtle  law  not 
deciphered.  Complicated  paradigms,  elabo- 
rate declensions,  and  conjugations  are  worn 
smooth,  clipped,  dropped,  or  elided.     Affixes 


104         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

and  suffixes  and  pestilent  little  syllables 
dropped  in  the  middle  of  verbs  and  nouns 
are  swallowed  like  Korah's  children. 

The  written  tongue  of  letters  keeps  them. 
The  spoken  word  sheds  them  in  the  tides  of 
time  like  a  swimmer  in  a  one-piece  bathing- 
suit.  A  circumflex  will  remain  in  French, 
the  touchstone  of  a  missing  5"  which  hissed 
through  Latin  centuries  and  grew  soft  and 
disappeared  in  the  liquid  note  of  the  Midi. 
The  trick  of  the  triple  Vs  in  Arabic  will  be 
lost  and,  as  a  little  manual  of  pronunciation 
I  picked  up  in  Morocco  tells  of  an  ancient 
leader  of  the  prayers  of  the  Faithful  that  he 
spoke  the  three  Vs  as  none  had  since  the 
days  of  Ali,  the  son-in-law  of  the  Prophet, 
and  none  will  until  Gabriel  calls  the  tribes 
of  men  to  judgment.  Chinese  becomes  a 
question  of  tones  incredibly  difficult  to  learn. 
English  drops  its  h's  in  its  'ome  and  hell 
retains  the  absent  letter  among  a  people 
schooled  by  the  Puritan  schoolmaster. 
Broader  and  more  impassable  becomes  the 
gap  between  daily  gab  and  the  measured 
"regular"  speech  of  the  learned  and  lettered. 
Jerome's  masculine  version  of  the  Bible,  an 
amazing  translation,  the  unsurpassed  monu- 


NEWSPAPER   ENGLISH         105 

ment  of  the  later  Latin,  will  give  priests, 
clerks,  and  statesmen  a  common  tongue  over 
all  Europe,  while  the  unlearned  and  unlet- 
tered scatter  in  two  great  sundered  flocks, 
wandering  like  sheep  without  a  shepherd  in 
the  branching  tracks  of  the  two  great  pas- 
tures of  European  tongues,  Teuton  and  Ro- 
mance, with  an  hybrid  offspring  fringing  the 
border-lands  of  each. 

Our  160,000,000,  spread  over  the  isles  of 
the  oceans  and  throned  on  a  continent,  show 
less  differences  in  the  tongue  of  highways 
and  the  hedges,  of  the  mart  and  the  acad- 
emy, in  factory  and  fashion,  than  exists  in 
peoples  of  a  fourth  our  number.     Why  ? 

First,  because  your  Protestant  insisted 
that  every  man  must  hear  the  Pentecostal 
message  and  read  it  as  well  in  the  tongue  in 
which  he  was  born.  In  general  literacy,  in 
the  determination  that  the  whole  population 
shall  read  and  write,  the  English  folk  lead  all 
the  world  but  the  Protestant  lands  of  Europe 
and  of  Bohemia,  so  early  Protestant  in 
spirit. 

Second,  because  the  American  newspaper, 
the  English  colonial  press,  and,  in  a  measure, 
the  press  of  the  United  Kingdom  have  been 


io6         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

hospitable  and  ready  to  accept  the  illegiti- 
mate verbal  offspring  of  the  street,  born  on 
the  "wrong  side  of  the  blanket"  of  scholar- 
ship and  of  the  printing-press. 

We  of  the  craft  of  the  newspaper  have 
treated  these  words  as  Shakespeare  treated 
Faulconridge,  who  gave  him,  when  needs 
were,  the  centre  of  the  stage.  Samuel  John- 
son wanted  us  all  to  go  on  writing  like  Addi- 
son, Steele,  and  himself.  If  he  had  won  out 
we  should  have  had,  as  in  French,  a  phrasing 
of  the  Academy  for  leader  and  chronique  and 
another  for  the  street  and  the  provinces.  It 
is  one  of  the  advantages  of  reading  Willy 
that  you  find  in  her  pages  what  French  peo- 
ple really  use.  I  am  emboldened  also  to 
introduce  her  to  these  pages  because  she  is 
the  favorite  novelist  of  a  great  French 
philosopher. 

But  English,  unlike  French,  Spanish,  and 
Italian,  or  even  German,  is  essentially  one. 
Our  vocabulary  is  prodigious,  even  in  the 
newspaper.  I  have  met,  without  ever  really 
knowing,  a  journalist  who  after  forty  years 
of  work  counted  the  words  he  knew  he  had 
used  in  every  twentieth  page  of  Webster's 
Unabridged.     The    result   showed    that   he 


NEWSPAPER   ENGLISH         107 

had  employed  in  all  about  30,000  to  35,000 
words.  Try  the  test,  if  you  are  a  writer,  and 
you  will  be  startled  how  a  word  you  have 
once  used  springs  to  memory  as  you  march 
up  and  down  Webster's  broad  thoroughfare 
of  words.  W^hat  a  range  the  newspaper  has  1 
Through  its  catholic  use  of  language  English 
has  been  kept  like  a  marching  regiment  in 
close  formation.  Shibboleths  excite  in  news- 
paper English,  but  not  dialects.  We  have 
at  least  sixty  per  cent  of  the  newspaper 
circulation  of  the  world.  Our  consumption 
of  news  print  points  to  that.  In  the  old,  old 
days,  when  the  exchange  desk  had  not  lost 
its  high  place  in  the  newspaper  office,  I  read 
exchanges  for  some  months.  The  list  cov- 
ered the  world  of  newspapers  in  English. 
There  Lanigan  was  told  of  the  Akhoond  of 
Swat,  whose  death  had  come  to  The  World 
office  in  a  single  A.  P.  "flash,"  and  later,  too, 
in  the  Lahore  Civil  and  Military  Gazette  I 
read  the  "City  of  Dreadful  Night,"  which 
swept  me  with  the  seething  memory  of  an 
August  night  in  Mosul.  The  English  of  the 
newspapers  on  that  exchange  list  in  all  the 
homes  of  our  brotherhood  of  the  imposing 
stone,  was  careless  and  promiscuous,  but  it 


io8         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

never  merits  the  other  accusation.  The 
newspaper  has  done  world-wide  work  in 
leadership  by  keeping  us  all  reading  and 
therefore  speaking  the  same  English. 

If  Samuel  Johnson  had  had  his  way  we 
should  have  become  like  the  "Doktoren"  of 
the  German  leader  writers,  men  who  write 
in  a  literary  tongue.  The  greatest  of  them, 
Harden,  does  not.  Wilkes  and  Junius, 
particularly  Junius,  misled  us  for  a  while. 
Even  over  here,  until  Hale  made  over  the 
American  editorial  in  the  Boston  Advertiser, 
we  were  wandering  in  a  desert  of  polyglottic 
dignity. 

One,  Benjamin  Franklin,  saved  us.  He 
and  Johnson  lived  parallel  lives.  Johnson 
was  born  three  years  later  and  he  died  six 
years  earlier  than  Franklin.  Both  wrote 
early  and  they  wrote  to  the  last.  Each 
turned  to  the  periodical.  They  knew  men, 
letters,  and  affairs.  On  opposing  sides,  they 
fought  the  issues  and  the  battle  of  our  Revo- 
lution. Johnson  died  just  as  Franklin  signed 
the  treaty  of  peace  and  of  independence.  In 
the  lists  of  public  opinion,  the  style  of  Frank- 
lin was  pitted  against  the  style  of  Johnson. 
He  was  the  inventor  of  newspaper  English, 


NEWSPAPER  ENGLISH         109 

direct,  immediate,  knowing  humor  as  well 
as  argument,  using  the  speech  of  the  people. 
The  Hterary  world  in  England  and  here  ac- 
cepted the  style  of  Johnson;  the  world  of 
men  and  of  events  the  style  of  Franklin. 

The  world  is  unconsciously  ruled  by  it 
to-day.  We  all  walk  in  Franklin's  path  for 
ill  or  well.  Samuel  Johnson  is  a  back  num- 
ber. His  resonance,  his  even  and  easy  flow, 
his  antithetic  sentence,  his  sense  of  the  past, 
his  vast  vision  of  the  long  march  of  European 
tongues  from  the  stylus  to  the  printing-press, 
these  are  gone.  He  is  with  the  other  Pha- 
raohs of  the  captivity  and  isolation  of  litera- 
ture. Franklin  was  not  altogether  alone. 
Defoe  was  before  him.  Cobbett  came  after. 
But  more  than  any  other  one  man,  Franklin, 
the  newspaper  man,  saved  us  from  a  separa- 
tion and  divorce  of  the  English  of  the  people 
and  the  English  of  the  writer.  The  tempta- 
tion was  to  make  the  prose  of  the  eighteenth 
century  a  standard.  Instead,  the  current  of 
the  talk  of  the  many  and  the  diction  of  the 
writer  merged.  The  new  words  and  phrases, 
the  changes  in  the  details  of  speech,  slang, 
and  the  imagery  of  our  American  speech,  all 
these,  through  the  newspapers,  found  their 


no        THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

way  into  print  and  acceptance  in  the  Ameri- 
can newspaper.  The  "column"  is  a  sort  of 
bedding  bench  where  the  new  phrases  and 
words  of  the  hour  are  set  out  as  the  gardener 
beds  and  pots  young  plants  before  they  go 
to  live  in  the  garden-beds  with  an  older 
bloom.  The  sporting  page  diffuses  the  ar- 
got of  the  hour  in  every  athletic  field.  What 
use  a  genius  like  O.  Henry  made  of  all  this 
in  what  we  all  admit  is  literature;  but  how 
few  of  us,  alumni  of  a  morning  daily  now 
gone,  saw  this  when  our  Washington  de- 
spatches and  city  reports  jostled  his  work 
in  the  New  York  Sun  ! 

If  any  one  desires  to  know  how  slang 
should  be  and  can  be  introduced  to  better 
company,  study  O.  Henry.  He  uses  it  for 
atmosphere  and  flavor  and  does  not  make  it 
the  warp  and  woof  of  his  fabric,  as  the  base- 
ball reporter  does  too  often.  Even  in  this 
difficult  and  cryptic  field,  how  easily  does  a 
master-hand  like  Mr.  Grantland  Rice,  of 
the  New  York  Tribune,  combine  the  pic- 
turesque technic  of  the  bleachers  with  dig- 
nity, precision,  and  strokes  of  illuminating 
humor  worthy  any  field  !  Charles  A.  Dana 
had  no  hesitation  in  the  use  by  his  staff  of 


NEWSPAPER   ENGLISH         in 

any  two-fisted  phrase  of  the  streets,  so  It  did 
its  work.  He  himself  was  keenly  awake  to 
every  change  In  a  living  tongue  like  English, 
and  no  style  could  be  purer  and  more  Impec- 
cable than  his,  born  of  study,  of  an  amazing 
capacity  for  language,  a  scholar  In  that 
practical  philology  which  aids  a  man  to  use 
his  own  tongue  the  better  and  more  effec- 
tively. 

The  daily  risk  of  newspapers  and  the  indi- 
vidual newspaper  is  that  it  will  have  an  edi- 
torial dialect  of  its  own,  that  reporting  will 
become  reportese,  that  criticism  will  be  noth- 
ing more  than  shaking  a  kaleidoscope  of  ad- 
jectives, usually  laudatory,  and  that  each 
department  will  obscure  its  message  to  the 
average  man  by  using  terms  known  on  Wall 
Street,  in  trade,  in  the  court-room  or 
"sports"  and  "theatrical"  columns,  but 
fully  understood  nowhere  else.  The  one 
sure  and  only  way  to  avoid  this  and,  in- 
stead, to  keep  newspaper  English  a  living 
link  between  the  letters  of  the  past  and  the 
speech  of  the  present.  Is  to  know  both,  to 
live  in  great  letters  as  well  as  to  live  by  the 
last  news.  Unless  this  be  done,  newspaper 
English  will  become  but  a  dialect,  and  news« 


112         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

paper  readers  be  separated  from  the  diction 
of  the  past.  If  any  young  writer  ask  how 
best  to  do  this,  let  him  not  only  Hve  with  the 
great,  but  train  his  sense  of  words  by  freely 
using  the  Concordance  of  Shakespeare,  the 
Bible,  Milton,  Shelley,  Keats,  Tennyson, 
Browning,  and  Wordsworth.  These  are  the 
true  guide  and  dictionary  of  the  writer  in  the 
use  and  meaning  of  words. 

The  ofifice  of  newspaper  English  is  to  be 
the  interpreter  of  the  ways  and  works  of  all 
men  and  all  women  to  each  and  all.  For 
this  it  needs  to  draw  freely  from  all  sources 
and  to  share  the  beatitude  of  Isaiah :  "  Bless- 
ed are  ye  who  sow  beside  all  waters."  Noth- 
ing is  too  recent  in  slang  for  its  columns,  and 
nothing  too  old  in  classic  letters. 

Occasions  there  are  and  subjects,  or 
weighty  or  solemn  or  both,  which  every 
trained  newspaperman  knows  call  for  the 
English  of  the  Bible,  of  Shakespeare,  of  the 
loftiest  prose.  Lincoln's  "Gettysburg  Ad- 
dress" has  but  three  words  not  in  the  Bible 
— "continent,"  "proposition,"  and  "civil" 
— and  these  are  all  in  Shakespeare.  This  is 
the  diction  in  which  a  man  should  soak  him- 
self, if  he  wishes  to  have  weight  with  those 


NEWSPAPER   ENGLISH         113 

who  read.     He  will  know  then  when  wisely 
to  add  the  word  of  the  hour. 

Taken  as  a  whole  the  newspaper  was 
never  better  written  and  never  did  its  work 
better  in  any  of  its  fields.  If  you  doubt 
this,  read  the  files !  They  will  dispel  the 
myth  of  a  past  when  all  wrote  well  on  some 
one  daily;  but  the  highest  success  of  news- 
paper English  and  the  most  important  office 
and  duty  has  been  discharged  in  keeping  the 
great  march  of  English  abreast  and  pre- 
venting a  great  tongue  from  being  divided 
into  a  language  of  the  past  for  letters  and 
a  language  of  the  present  for  common  and 
daily  use,  neither  sharing  the  life  of  the 
other. 


VII 

PROFESSIONAL  TRAINING 

The  training  of  the  journalist  has  run 
through  the  same  course  and  followed  the 
same  social  curve  as  have  all  the  callings 
known  to  men,  and  in  these  latter  days  to 
men  and  women.  Every  calling  began  as 
a  "mystery,"  a  mingling  of  knowledge,  of 
appropriate  technic  needed,  and  ministry 
with  those  who  had  acquired  the  "art  and 
mystery"  of  the  vocation.  This  is  the 
phrase  used  in  old  indentures  of  the  appren- 
tice, but  which  in  a  mediaeval  city  finally 
brought  one  to  membership,  let  us  say,  in 
the  "Worshipful  Company  of  Carpenters." 
This  guild  was  not  only  worshipful  because 
it  commanded  respect,  but  because  it  had  its 
own  worship,  its  gods,  its  worthies,  its  ritual 
and  its  secret  rites  of  initiation,  and  its  cov- 
enant of  mutual  loyalty  and  common  action, 
particularly  as  to  wages  received  and  charges 
for  service. 

Personal  contact  with  those  who  worked 

114 


PROFESSIONAL   TRAINING     115 

in  the  trade  or  calling  was  the  indispensa- 
ble beginning.  Exactly  as  a  family  had  its 
household  gods,  its  ritual,  and  its  traditional 
conduct,  so  had  the  trade.  In  every  work 
and  calling  there  has  been  a  long  struggle  be- 
fore anything  else  was  created.  The  special 
isolated  school  for  a  profession  is  in  its  gen- 
eral acceptance  a  little  over  a  century  old. 
Subjects  needed  in  law,  medicine,  and  di\'in- 
ity  were  taught  and  made  the  subject  of  lec- 
tures in  universities  very  early,  as  witness 
Greek  and  Roman  institutions  of  learning, 
but  the  final  admission  to  the  calling  re- 
quired personal  work  in  the  office  and  home 
of  lawyer,  physician,  and  clergyman.  When 
the  separate  school  was  proposed,  it  was  al- 
ways hard  fought.  For  a  longer  or  shorter 
time,  the  fact  that  it  was  a  separate  school 
was  disguised.  Lectures  were  given  in  law, 
but  only  to  students  "entered"  in  lawyers' 
offices,  their  work  there  running  from  sweep- 
ing out  the  office  to  reading  law.  Even 
after  it  was  clear  that  the  training  of  the 
school  was  successful  in  one  calling,  it  was 
fought  for  the  next  profession  on  the  ground, 
always  repeated  and  always  wrong,  that 
while  schools  were  good  for  other  pursuits, 


ii6         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

this  particular  calling,  like  Hires'  Root  Beer, 
was  "unlike  any  other."  Whether  the  beer 
is  or  is  not,  I  do  not  know ;  I  never  tasted  it. 
But  callings,  I  know,  are  not  "unHke  any 
other."  They  are  all  alike  in  needing  spe- 
cial professional  schools  and  prospering  un- 
der them.  I  reported  in  1875  the  first  grad- 
uating exercises  of  a  school  for  nurses  in  the 
United  States,  and  an  old  nurse  in  Bellevue 
(such  a  nurse!)  told  me  that  a  school  for 
nurses  was  all  wrong.  An  eminent  physician 
in  those  distant  days  asserted  the  trained 
nurse  would  neither  obey  nor  be  respectful. 
In  my  editorial  work  I  have  shared  the  fight 
for  the  business  college  and  trade-schools. 
These  callings,  too,  "could  not  be  taught." 
The  list  is  a  long  one.  It  includes  the  State 
regulation  of  the  practice  of  medicine,  and 
the  removal  of  the  power  to  admit  to  the  bar 
from  the  courts  to  a  State  examination. 

These  fights  all  follow  the  same  course. 
First,  all  callings  must  be  learned  by  prac- 
tice, and  this  particular  calling  has  special 
reasons  which  make  it  quite  impossible  and 
undesirable  to  teach  its  "art  and  mystery." 
When  this  has  been  triumphantly  done  for 
successive  crops  of  students  who  forge  ahead, 


PROFESSIONAL  TRAINING     117 

then  it  is  urged  that  the  old  path  must  be 
kept  open.  This  lasts  until  the  school- 
trained  men  in  the  calling  are  in  a  majority, 
and,  in  general,  doing  better  than  the  office- 
trained  men.  The  bars  go  up  and  the  State 
prescribes  the  standards  of  the  schools,  and 
superintends  the  examination  for  entrance  to 
practice.  At  this  stage  it  is  agreed  that 
every  other  calling  save  the  one  in  dispute 
has  improved  under  State  examinations,  but 
in  this  particular  calling  the  Hires'  Root  Beer 
precedent  holds,  and  the  State  cannot  wisely 
regulate  examinations  admitting  to  prac- 
tice. This  is  the  position  in  which  schools 
of  journalism  now  stand.  They  exist  all 
over  the  country.  Their  students  are  suc- 
cessful. In  time  all  the  universities  in  cities 
will  be  training  journalists,  the  oldest  and 
most  dignified,  not  always,  last;  but  the 
"freedom  of  the  press,"  for  some  mysterious 
reason,  makes  it  necessary  for  ignorant  men 
to  be  permitted  to  botch  skilled  tasks, 
though  in  the  end  journalism  is  certain  to 
pass  through  the  same  familiar  and  inevita- 
ble social  law,  as  all  the  other  callings. 

The  experience  of  the  newspaper  office, 
personally  acquired  knowledge  and  acquain- 


ii8         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

tance  with  the  ruling  fraction  of  society  were 
the  one  path  for  journaHsts,  as  long  as  social 
forces  and  society  itself,  political  process  and 
event  had  no  systematic  record.  Then  the 
gathering  of  neighborhood  news,  the  picking 
up  of  the  more  or  less  unconsidered  trifles 
of  government,  and  the  knowledge  of  the 
world's  greater  happenings  were  accidental 
and  dependent  on  the  arrival  of  a  clipper  ship 
or  of  a  steamship,  a  personal  letter,  a  pack- 
age of  newspapers  from  another  place,  the 
slow  movement  of  the  mails  and  the  irregular 
leakage  of  government  action  and  adminis- 
tration in  reports,  speeches,  and  despatches. 
This  made  newspaper  work  a  thing  to  be 
learned  only  in  the  newspaper  office.  No- 
body could  teach  it.  The  dye  not  only  mas- 
tered the  dyer's  hand,  but  the  man  had  to 
stand  neck-deep  in  the  vat  and  be  soaked 
with  the  dye  himself,  or  he  could  not  acquire 
the  knowledge  which  enabled  him  to  record 
facts  and  spread  ideas  through  the  commu- 
nity. There  existed  no  body  of  recorded 
fact  as  to  sociological  structure,  as  to  politi- 
cal science,  as  to  the  organization  and  ad- 
ministration of  government,  as  to  the  rela- 
tion of  lands  and  nations,  and  as  to  the  facts 


PROFESSIONAL  TRAINING     119 

which  sometimes  create  and  are  sometimes 
created  by  the  forces  of  society,  whose  laws, 
whose  curve,  and  whose  effects  we  are  now 
only  dimly  perceiving  and  conceiving. 

All  this  makes  the  task  of  teaching  jour- 
nalism more  difficult  and  more  subject  to  ex- 
periment, though  this  is  still  in  progress  in 
law,  medicine,  and  engineering.  Nor  would 
the  divinity  schools  be  injured  by  some  ex- 
periments. 

The  training  for  a  bachelor  of  science  (in 
chemistry)  is,  in  its  nature,  definite,  precise, 
and  capable  of  being  reduced  to  rule  and 
expressed  with  accuracy  in  terms  of  study 
hours  and  the  laboratory.  But  the  profes- 
sional problem  in  such  a  case  is  very  different 
from  that  offered  by  the  social  callings  usu- 
ally associated  w^ith  professional  training. 
When  knowledge  comes,  there  teaching  be- 
gins, and  personal  contact  with  the  work  of 
a  vocation  is  of  lessening  educational  value. 
The  training  of  all  callings  goes  through  this 
evolution.  The  development  of  the  law 
school  came  with  the  development  of  the 
law  book,  the  code,  the  digest,  and  the  in- 
creasing publication  of  decisions.  As  the 
part  played  by  the  two  factors  of  personal 


120         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

knowledge  and  mere  acquaintance  with  pro- 
cedure diminished  and  the  recorded  share  of 
law  increased,  the  law  school  grew  until, 
within  the  memory  of  men  now  living  and 
still  in  the  active  work  of  life,  the  school 
superseded  the  office,  and  a  costly  education 
was  acquired  even  by  those  who,  in  common 
practice,  cannot  hope  to  have  an  annual  in- 
come of  any  great  size.  There  are  a  very 
large  number  of  lawyers  who  do  not  receive 
in  a  year  much  more  than  half  of  the  sum 
spent  on  their  education,  and  often  only  one- 
fourth,  yet  the  investment  is  sound,  because 
without  it  even  this  income  could  not  have 
been  earned.  In  all  these  callings  the  real 
reward  is  not  the  personal  wage,  but  oppor- 
tunity, outlook,  and  a  share  in  the  govern- 
ment and  direction  of  social  forces  in  opera- 
tion, so  that  a  man  constitutes  part  of  the 
brain  of  the  community  instead  of  being  part 
of  the  dumb  mechanical  process  through 
which  the  material  world  Is  digested  for  the 
nutrition  of  society.  Better  the  least  cell  in 
the  brain  of  society,  however  poorly  nour- 
ished, than  yards  of  flourishing,  smooth- 
rolling,  well-fed  Intestine. 

The  education  of  the  newspaper  writer 


PROFESSIONAL   TRAINING     121 

and  the  growth  of  the  circulation  of  the 
newspaper  have  both  risen  with  the  educa- 
tion of  the  community.  When  EngHsh  jour- 
nalism began  in  the  seventeenth  century  not 
over  a  tenth  of  male  adults  read  freely,  and 
the  circulation  of  a  news  sheet  ran  to  a  few 
hundreds.  By  the  opening  of  the  eighteenth 
century,  reading  England  had  grown  suffi- 
ciently to  furnish  a  weekly  like  The  Specta- 
tor with  a  circulation  of  1 1 ,000.  Even  in  a 
century  the  London  daily  had  not  reached 
this  circulation,  and  the  New  York  dailies  of 
a  century  ago  had  reached  but  1,000  to 
2,000,  the  latter  by  The  Commercial  Adver- 
tiser. The  total  circulation  of  New  York 
dailies  in  1820  was  10,800;  in  191 5  it  was 
4,515,000.  The  population  of  Greater  New 
York  in  this  span  had  grown  fortyfold;  the 
newspaper  daily  circulation  over  410-fold. 
The  different  ratios  are  an  approximate 
ratio  of  the  increase  of  the  diffusion  of  news- 
papers in  a  given  population  and  of  the 
increased  importance,  not  always  increased 
influence,  of  the  daily.  As  a  population  in- 
creases in  intelligence  and  its  horizon  be- 
comes more  extended,  the  more  it  thinks  for 
itself  and  needs  for  those  who  influence  it 


122         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

through    the    newspaper    a    more    efficient 
training. 

In  the  century  we  are  considering  general 
public  education  has  risen  from  the  primary 
school  to  grammar  grades,  from  grammar 
grades  to  the  high  school,  and  now  from  the 
high  school  to  the  college.  The  training  of 
the  newspaperman  has  gone  through  the 
same  cycle.  The  American  editors  of  the 
eighteenth  century,  led  by  Franklin,  were 
nearly  all  printers.  They  remained  so 
through  the  first  half  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury for  many  dailies.  Of  the  conspicuous 
editors  from  1830  to  the  Civil  War,  Bennett, 
Raymond,  Webb,  and  Bryant  were  college 
trained,  and  Greeley  was  a  printer.  His 
education  came  from  country  schools  and 
the  printing  office,  a  school  in  itself.  When 
Charles  A.  Dana  organized  The  Sun  in  1869, 
a  college  man,  though  not  a  college  graduate, 
he  selected  printers  for  his  leading  posts — 
managing  editor,  news  editor,  and  city  edi- 
tor. Before  five  years  had  passed  The  Sun 
was  officered  by  college  graduates,  though  a 
large  part  of  its  staff  had  only  a  common 
school  education.  The  high  school  began 
to  force  its  graduates  into  the  newspapers 


PROFESSIONAL   TRAINING     123 

from  1870  on.  In  Philadelphia  for  the  past 
forty  years  the  working  force  of  the  news- 
papers has  come  in  great  measure  from  the 
high  schools.  College  men  began  to  grow 
frequent  in  Philadelphia  newspapers  in  the 
'eighties;  but  they  are  still  considerably 
fewer  in  number  there  than  are  college  men 
on  the  dailies  of  New  York  and  Boston. 
The  same  changes  have  taken  place  in  the 
West  and  South,  but  less  rapidly.  In  the 
last  decade  the  graduates  of  schools  of  jour- 
nalism have  begun  to  appear.  Elementary 
schools,  high  schools,  colleges,  and  schools 
of  journalism  have  followed  in  regular  suc- 
cession in  furnishing  men  for  work  "up- 
stairs," in  the  writing  end  of  the  newspaper, 
and  the  newspaper  office  of  thirty  and  forty 
years  hence  will  be  manned  by  men  who 
have  shared  all  these  successive  steps  in 
American  education.  Sixty  years  hence  the 
State  will  require  a  specific  training  for  the 
newspaperman;  first,  as  in  the  other  call- 
ings, some  minimum  of  education;  second, 
certain  years  of  professional  training,  and 
at  length  a  specific  examination. 

These  are  the  conditions  under  which  the 
young  man  or  woman  who  enters  the  news- 


124         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

paper  office  now  will  pass  the  riper  and  more 
useful  years  of  their  calling.  The  college 
man  who  became  a  reporter  fifty  years  ago 
was  lonely.  Few  of  his  companions  had  this 
training.  To-day  he  finds  the  leading  posts 
in  most  metropolitan  dailies  manned  by  col- 
lege graduates.  He  is  glad  of  every  bit  and 
sign  of  higher  education  he  has,  and  if  he 
happens  to  have  more  than  the  usual  com- 
plement of  degrees  he  finds  that  newspaper 
offices  all  over  the  United  States  look  on 
them  as  an  asset  and  not  a  liability. 

The  young  journalist  of  to-day  cannot 
take  too  much  training  for  newspaper  work, 
and  the  promotion  of  the  thoroughly  edu- 
cated cub  reporter  brings  rapid  advance, 
though,  as  in  a  law  or  engineering  office,  he 
begins  with  mechanical  work.  There  are 
many  newspaper  offices  in  the  United  States 
which  will  not  take  a  new  man  unless  he  has 
at  least  a  high  school  training.  This  is 
looked  on  as  a  minimum  requirement,  and 
more  education  is  desired.  The  graduates 
of  schools  of  journalism  find  their  training 
accepted  as  a  qualification  which  greatly 
adds  to  the  chances  of  getting  a  place.  In 
the  case  of  the  Columbia  School  of  Journal- 


PROFESSIONAL  TRAINING     125 

ism,  year  by  year  the  men  who  are  gradu- 
ated, if  they  wish  to  begin  work  at  once,  have 
a  place  waiting  for  them  when  they  receive 
their  diplomas,  and  some  have  begun  work 
in  a  newspaper  office  before  the  end  of  the 
last  semester.  The  School  of  Journalism 
in  the  University  of  Missouri,  organized  by 
Doctor  Walter  Williams  in  1908,  the  first 
in  date  of  all  such  schools,  has  had  a  like 
success.  In  every  school,  as  the  number 
of  classes  grows  and  more  alumni  are  in 
newspaper  offices,  graduates  are  more  and 
more  certain  to  find  places.  Women  grad- 
uates have  more  difficulty  in  finding  news- 
paper places  than  men.  The  reverse  of  this 
is  true  in  the  West.  There  women  are  more 
welcome  in  the  newspaper  office  than  in  the 
East.  It  is  seventy  years  since  women  first 
found  places  in  New  York  offices,  and  men 
still  shy  at  them.  Race  prejudices  also 
exist,  which  interfere  with  the  best  man  get- 
ting the  best  job.  This  is  still  more  true  of 
color.  While  these  three  forms  of  prejudices 
exist,  of  sex,  race,  and  color,  this  country 
cannot  be  considered  either  Christian  or 
civilized. 

In  newspaper  work,  as  in  all  the  callings 


126         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

for  which  systematic  training  exists,  the  eco- 
nomic value  of  a  professional  school  in  se- 
curing a  place  for  its  graduates  is  at  least 
as  important  as  its  education,  if  both 
employment  and  schooling  are  administered 
with  impartial  integrity.  Fraternities  of 
great  value  and  use  In  college  become  the 
source  of  possible  peril  where  a  school  opens 
the  door  to  a  place  where  a  man  begins  train- 
ing for  wage-earning. 

The  growth  of  population  and  the  like 
growth  of  students,  the  happy  absence  of 
privilege,  except  as  noted  above,  the  fortu- 
nate lack  of  a  class  to  which  people  look  up 
(there  are  plenty  of  people  who  look  down, 
which  is  but  dull  work  when  no  one  looks 
up),  give  a  great  indiscriminate  swarm,  num- 
bered by  the  hundred  thousand,  every  year 
leaving  high  schools — the  end  of  education 
to  nine-tenths  of  those  who  attend  these 
schools — who  are  seeking  places.  Neither 
these  nor  their  parents  know  places,  and 
the  places  do  not  know  them.  No  waste 
is  so  fatal  as  delay  in  getting  the  young 
man  or  woman  of  ability  into  the  place 
that  demands  ability.  This  achievement 
IS,  for  the  professional  school,  a  most  im- 


PROFESSIONAL  TRAINING     127 

portant  task.  Parentage  and  pelf  often 
find  places,  but  this  is  worth  little  unless 
the  child  who  gets  a  place  delivers  ability 
as  well  as  a  pedigree.  This  often  occurs,  but 
it  is  not  invariable.  The  school  knows  the 
student  better  than  the  parent,  and  is  gener- 
ally far  wiser  as  regards  the  child.  The  more 
highly  civilized  a  community  is  and  the  more 
intelligent  its  parents  are,  the  earlier  they 
understand  this  highly  important  fact.  But 
the  larger  the  population  the  more  bewilder- 
ing becomes  the  blindman's  buff  of  place  and 
worker.  When  I  went  to  work  in  the  New 
York  World  in  1873  there  were  about  6,000 
journalists  in  the  United  States.  Now  there 
are  from  50,000  to  60,000.  I  got  a  place 
through  a  college  friend  now  distinguished, 
Mr.  William  C.  Brownell,  who  in  two  years 
had  become  city  editor,  to  whom  I  cherish 
a  constant  gratitude  through  all  the  years. 
These  personal  relations  decide  most  news- 
paper selections  of  new  men.  This  is  bad 
for  the  calling,  and  a  cruel  injustice  to  un- 
known ability.  The  trained  and  informed 
judgment  of  the  professional  school  re- 
dresses this  injustice,  particularly  in  law. 
This    is    a    democratic    service.     Yearly    it 


128        THE  NEWSPAPERMAN 

opens  careers  to  the  able  unknown.  This 
stiffens  the  work  done  by  students  and  gives 
the  teacher  a  grip  on  the  work  done  nothing 
else  can  fashion.  Every  man  familiar  with 
law  firms,  with  selections  for  hospital  posts, 
and  the  employment  of  engineers,  knows 
that  parental  and  class  influence  have  grown 
less  in  the  last  forty  years,  though  the  well- 
bred  trustees  of  some  private  hospitals  keep 
alive  the  old  evils  by  personal  selections. 
Tax-supported  hospitals  in  nearly  all  our 
cities  select  internes  only  by  competitive  ex- 
aminations. Year  by  year,  more  and  more 
newspapers  turn  to  the  schools  of  journalism 
for  new  men.  The  Chicago  Tribune  has  rec- 
ognized this  by  starting  a  School  of  Journal- 
ism in  Northwestern  University,  under  a 
most  able,  competent,  and  successful  head, 
Mr.  H.  F.  Harrington. 

Writing  and  "English"  studies  were,  per- 
haps, not  unnaturally,  looked  upon  in  the 
early  organization  of  courses  in  journalism 
as  forming  the  bulk  of  their  instruction.  No 
newspaperman  has  ever  believed  in  this. 
If  a  journalist  has  not  some  Instinct  and  fa- 
cility for  writing,  he  is  foolish  to  go  into  a 
writing  trade.     Most  men  and  women  who 


PROFESSIONAL  TRAINING     129 

enter  a  school  of  journalism  take  all  the 
writing  courses  they  can.  This  is  demoral- 
izing. Not  over  a  third  of  the  time  should 
be  given  to  strictly  professional  courses.  In 
a  day  when  all  American  education  tends  to 
speedy  and  facile  results  without  labor,  the 
journalism  student  moves  in  the  same  direc- 
tion. He  is  nearly  always  trying  to  get  writ- 
ing and  professional  courses  which  enable 
him  to  write  without  thinking  or  studying. 
This  is  the  curse  of  the  American  newspaper. 
Beware  of  schools  of  journalism  which  di- 
vide up  the  work  of  the  newspaper  into 
many  departments,  many  of  which  simply 
add  to  the  writing.  This  alone  is  worthless. 
Knowledge  is  needed.  If  a  course  in  dra- 
matic criticism  runs  to  lectures  and  writing 
about  plays  as  they  come,  the  student  fails  of 
adequate  training.  Hard  and  copious  read- 
ing on,  and  in,  criticism  is  demanded;  the 
student,  as  far  as  possible,  should  be  required 
to  familiarize  himself  with  history,  record, 
and  place  of  play,  playwright,  and  actor. 
No  one  can  criticise  adequately  without 
special  preparation.  This  is  equally  true  of 
current  criticism  on  painting,  sculpture,  and 
music.     Previous  preparation  must  go  hand 


130         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

in  hand  with  a  general  discussion  of  the  gen- 
eral field  before  the  critic  is  adequately  pre- 
pared to  write  criticism.  The  urge  of  the 
student  is  to  rest  satisfied  with  the  individual 
reaction  before  a  particular  article;  but  this 
is  the  criticism  of  which  M.  de  Goncourt 
wrote  "that  It  Is  a  way  of  saying  more  or 
less  politely :  '  My  taste  is  better  than  your 
taste.'"  Book  reviews,  most  of  all,  require 
an  adequate  bibliographical  equipment,  per- 
sonal acquaintance  with  the  subject,  and  a 
careful  consideration  and  knowledge  of  the 
authors.  Criticism  less  carefully  considered 
is  a  mere  haphazard  opinion  joined  to  a  sum- 
mary. This  runs  through  the  entire  field 
of  the  newspaper. 

The  writing  courses  must  cover  reporting, 
editing,  criticism  and  opinion,  or  editorial. 
Editing,  the  word  is  used  technically,  deals 
with  planning  and  executing  the  city  editor's 
day's  work,  the  news  and  night  editors' 
tasks,  the  preparation  of  copy  and  the 
"make-up,"  for  the  press.  The  Sunday 
supplement  and  its  demands  must  be  met, 
work  which  trains  for  the  routine  of  the 
magazine.  The  practical  work  of  writing 
on  acting,  music,  financial  affairs,  sports  and 


PROFESSIONAL   TRAINING     131 

political  events,  police  headquarters,  and  a 
wide  succession  of  events  can  only  be  fully 
gained  in  a  great  city.  The  history  of 
journalism  opens  the  ethics,  the  evolution, 
the  growth,  and  the  theory  and  tradition  of 
the  calling.  In  a  small  town,  a  small  news- 
paper can  be  published;  but  the  news  is 
small-town  news.  It  is  better  for  the  stu- 
dent to  see  and  describe  the  wide  round  of 
life  than  to  see  himself  in  print  on  small 
events,  if  this  choice  must  be  made. 

Professional  training  must  be  supple- 
mented by  American  and  European  history, 
economics,  political  science  at  college,  two 
years  at  least  being  required,  before  two 
years  of  professional  work.  Before  long 
three  years  of  college  and  three  of  technical 
work  will  be  seen  to  be  needed.  Even  now, 
recent  American  political  history,  the  causes 
and  the  current  consequences  of  the  Great 
War,  economics  and  finance,  a  share  of 
modern  geography  which  acquaints  the  stu- 
dent with  the  world's  larger  products,  the 
principles  of  political  law,  and  the  frame- 
work of  judicature,  and  a  constant  reading 
of  the  newspaper  under  dissection  which 
tests  the  students'  familiarity  with  current 


132         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

news,  and  the  ability  to  translate  at  sight 
at  least  one  modern  language,  joined  with 
the  knowledge  of  current  European  letters 
as  expressed  by  its  leading  figures,  measure 
the  indispensable  task  of  a  school  of  journal- 
ism. Reporting  should  be  continued  through 
all  the  professional  course.  This  is  not 
agreeable  work  done  from  a  newspaper 
office.  It  is  still  harder  done  from  a  school. 
Exactly  as  in  a  newspaper  office  every  one 
knows  the  advantage  of  keeping  out  of  the 
office,  and  yet  almost  ever>'  one  grasps  the 
first  opportunity  for  a  desk  place,  so  the 
student  in  journalism  too  often  avoids  as- 
signments, outside  the  classroom,  if  he  pos- 
sibly can.  Editorial  WTiting  in  particular 
must  be  steadied  by  study  and  the  daily 
reading  of  current  opinion,  or  mere  callow 
expression  of  youthful  views  is  offered  on 
the  subject  of  the  hour,  with  no  conception 
of  the  close  knowledge  of  issues  and  of  the 
political  situation  needed  for  the  editorials 
of  a  campaign,  and  too  often,  also,  without 
training  in  the  information  editorial,  critical 
subjects,  and  the  wide  range  of  social  topics. 
Here  again  study  only  can  equip. 

This  long  struggle  between  the  student 


I 


PROFESSIONAL  TRAINING     133 

who  wants  to  enter  early  on  the  practice  of 
writing  instead  of  mastering  the  fundamen- 
tals of  his  subject  before  writing,  has  ap- 
peared in  all  professional  courses.  Sixty 
and  more  years  ago  a  man  could  get  as  good 
a  degree  in  medicine  as  was  offered,  in  from 
eighteen  months  to  twenty.  He  entered  the 
medical  school  in  late  October,  and  in  a  year 
from  the  following  April  he  had  his  degree. 
Lectures  were  given  without  demonstration. 
Laboratories  were  almost  unknown.  There 
was  no  body  of  bacteriological  and  other 
knowledge  to  be  used  in  teaching  through 
the  laboratory.  The  student  wasted  a  good 
deal  of  time  on  dissection,  to  no  very  direct 
purpose,  he  memorized  answers  to  his  ex- 
aminations drawn  by  a  quiz  master,  and  he 
learned  how  to  write  prescriptions  of  medi- 
cine used  with  little  exact  knowledge  as  to 
their  effects.  Many  were  useless.  Many 
"doctors"  were  practising  who  had  never 
attended  a  medical  school  and  whose  oppo- 
sition prevented  improvement.  Any  prog- 
ress in  the  lawyer's  training  was  halted 
by  schools  which  delivered  courses  of  lec- 
tures and  were  easy  in  their  examinations. 
A  few  schools  began  better  work  in  law  and 


134         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

medicine,  but  their  work  was  under  competi- 
tion from  schools  whose  occasional  able 
graduate,  able  to  succeed  against  any  odds, 
was  perpetually  cited  as  a  proof  that  no 
improvement  was  needed.  Fortunately,  the 
tradition  of  the  guild,  its  art  and  mystery 
and  its  privileges  closed  to  those  who  could 
not  meet  its  standards,  lingered  in  the  sub- 
liminal social  consciousness  of  the  English- 
speaking  folk,  and  for  half  a  century  past  a 
reform  in  the  training  for  these  callings  came 
into  vigorous  being  in  most  of  the  States. 

It  became  possible  to  do  for  the  welfare 
and  advance  of  the  law  and  medical  stu- 
dent what  needs  now  to  be  done  in  training 
men  and  women  for  the  newspaper,  for 
business,  for  engineering,  and  also  for  the 
teacher,  whose  qualifications  should  be  na- 
tion-wide, as  with  all  other  callings.  The 
standards  in  chemistry,  physics,  and  biology 
in  our  colleges  are  now  unsymmetrically  bi- 
lateral. There  is  one  standard  for  the  young 
student  who  is  going  to  enter  a  medical 
school  of  the  first  rank.  He  has  to  submit 
his  lecture  and  laboratory  work,  not  to  the 
fostering  college  shepherd  who  is  desirous  of 
getting  as  many  sheep  to  market  as  possible, 


PROFESSIONAL  TRAINING     135 

but  to  the  impersonal  verdict  of  a  medical 
school  which  expects  to  keep  its  number 
down  and  its  efficiency  up.  Schools  of  jour- 
nalism accept,  as  the  case  may  be,  two  or 
three  years  of  college  work,  a  part  or  all  of 
which  is  prescribed,  but  the  school  has  no 
such  grip  on  the  standard  of  their  work  as 
has  the  medical  school  for  its  requirement, 
owing  to  the  lack  of  a  State  examination. 

Yet  adequate  work  of  the  first  order  in 
history,  political  economy,  and  political  sci- 
ence is  as  necessary  to  the  journalist  as  like 
work  in  chemistry,  physics,  and  biology  are 
to  the  medical  student.  Until  this  standard 
can  be  secured  by  setting  up  State  standards 
and  State  examinations,  the  work  in  all  the 
studies  of  the  callings  cited,  not  to  say  the 
teaching,  will  also  be  slack.  There  are  insti- 
tutions which  hide  under  the  mantle  of  a 
B.  S.  from  teachers,  parents,  and  the  public 
the  actual  fact  that  engineering  and  busi- 
ness courses  are  offered  to  which  the  means, 
equipment,  and  teaching  are  not  equal. 
Conditions  are  still  worse  where  stray 
courses  in  journalism  are  embedded  as 
branches  of  training  in  "  English,"  which  are 
nothing  but  an  attempt,  not  always  success- 


136         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

ful,  to  teach  the  EngHsh  of  the  newspaper. 
Weakness  exists  in  permitting  students  to 
substitute  bric-a-brac  courses  in  Hterature 
and  various  brands  of  the  whipped-cream 
syllabus  of  learning,  falsely  so  called,  which 
bear  the  same  relation  to  the  studies  the 
journalist  needs  that  an  ice-cream  soda  does 
to  a  meal.  It  may  stay  the  pang  of  hunger, 
but  is  ill  food  for  a  man  in  training. 

The  conscientious  teacher  and  the  consci- 
entious student  will  refuse  to  be  deceived  by 
these  attempts  to  give  the  forms  and  not  the 
substance  of  training.  Too  much  college 
training  in  the  United  States  is  sapped  and 
mined  by  these  various  desires  to  keep  the 
ancient  label  and  substitute  a  two  and 
three  quarter  per  cent  fluid  which  never 
satisfies.  The  conscientious  student  needs 
to  understand  and  appreciate  that  the  great 
task  before  him  requires  solid  foundations 
and  accurate  knowledge.  In  the  United 
States,  beyond  other  lands,  the  economics 
and  taxation  of  the  commonwealth,  federal 
and  State,  the  preservation  of  the  ancient 
landmarks  of  constitutional  law,  the  jealous 
defense  of  those  far-reaching  principles  of 
practice,  on  which  rest  the  safety  of  the 


PROFESSIONAL  TRAINING     137 

family,  the  protection  of  the  property,  and 
the  security  of  the  many,  above  all  the  in- 
dispensable privilege  and  right  that  all 
these  issues  shall  freely  be  brought  before 
the  bar  and  in  the  forum  of  political  discus- 
sion require  for  the  very  life  of  the  republic 
studies  enabling  the  newspaperman  to  come 
to  exposition  and  decision  on  these  issues 
with  knowledge  of  principles. 

He  must  have  a  familiarity  with  their  ap- 
plication in  the  past,  and  he  should  also  pos- 
sess the  trained  capacity  to  meet  the  soph- 
ism, the  false  premises,  and  the  lying  his- 
tory of  those  who  seek  to  undermine  the 
security  of  law  and  liberty  in  the  name  of 
a  freedom  cloaking  robbery.  The  decisions 
of  a  newspaper  on  all  these  issues  are  con- 
stant and  manifold.  A  head  may  impeach 
the  foundations  of  order  in  a  phrase  written 
at  the  night  desk  by  a  man  untrained.  The 
way  in  which  news  is  edited  may  deceive 
a  multitude  as  to  either  fact  or  policy.  The 
tone  of  an  editorial  may  be  more  poisonous 
than  frank  utterance.  The  publisher  and 
owner  may  shake  the  foundations  of  the  con- 
fidence of  the  many  in  the  good  faith  and 
logic  of  the  newspaper  by  his  effort  to  pre- 


138         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

serve  what  he  deems  to  be  the  rights  of  prop- 
erty, but  are  really  only  specious  attempts 
to  use  these  rights  to  bind  heavy  burdens  on 
the  many  from  which  the  shoulders  of  the 
few  escape  because  some  distant  decision 
confused  law  and  justice,  and  in  the  face  of 
the  perils  of  one  generation  weakened  the 
safeguards  of  the  next.  Not  only  past  law, 
but  future  progress  in  law  must  be  the  task 
of  the  journalist  when  conditions  are  changed 
and  the  work  of  great  cyclic  forces  has 
raised  to  new  light  and  to  education  whole 
strata  of  the  population,  while  higher  wages 
have  given  new  relations  and  rights  in  the 
general  scheme  of  the  State.  This  scheme 
or  Constitution  is  always  liable  to  cramp 
the  growth  of  society  as  ancient  cities  are 
strangled  in  their  growth  by  fortifications 
which  once  were  the  glories  of  their  defense, 
the  indispensable  protection  from  sack  and 
slaughter.  Party,  prejudice,  the  shibboleths 
of  ancient  law  may  be  distorted  to  vicious 
use  by  the  shrill  screams  of  those  who  make 
their  living  not  by  saving  the  State  or  pop- 
ular rights  from  peril  as  they  profess,  but  by 
playing  on  the  misconception  of  the  multi- 
tude.   These  may  be  conservative  or  radical 


PROFESSIONAL  TRAINING     139 

— white,  black,  yellow,  or  red.  These  perils 
grow  more  constant  and  more  dangerous  as 
population  grows,  property  is  diffused,  and 
all  men  desire  the  comforts  and  privileges 
enjoyed  by  any. 

Newspapers  do  not  make  events  and 
issues.     Events  and  issues  make  newspapers. 

A  pervasive  ** culture"  which  leaves  a  man 
unable  to  express  himself  in  English  both  un- 
derstood by  the  people  and  approved  by  the 
scholar  is  of  no  use  to  a  journalist,  however 
useful  and  accepted  it  may  be  in  a  record  of 
research.  English  which  has  these  twin 
qualities,  spurred  by  a  desire  and  purpose 
to  reach  the  reader  under  the  term  of  "jour- 
nalistic writing" — a  vile  phrase — is  spread- 
ing to  the  high  schools,  as  divergent  from 
"literary"  English.  This  phrase  represents 
a  valid  difference  and  distinction  between 
writing  which  is  self-expression,  as  in  litera- 
ture, and  the  use  of  language  as  a  weapon, 
tool,  or  medium  for  informing,  persuading, 
inspiring,  directing,  or  leading.  This  dis- 
tinction lay  hid  in  De  Quincey's  mind  when 
he  said  that,  in  literature,  style  was  an  end 
and  in  journalism  a  means.  These  courses 
in  "journalistic  English"  seek  in  this  phrase 


140        THE  NEWSPAPERMAN 

an  end  and  an  object  whose  name  and  nature 
are  still  vague  in  the  minds  of  those  who,  in 
offering  such  studies,  take  as  a  model  the 
newspaper  written  in  a  hurry,  when  there 
is  at  hand  an  inspired  revelation  of  a  better 
and  more  admirable  way  in  literature,  writ- 
ten for  all  time,  Shakespeare  and  the  Bible. 
During  our  past  history  we  passed  through 
elections,  periods,  and  conflicts  in  which  sin- 
gle definite  issues  came  successively  before 
the  public.  Most  of  them  had  a  strong  mor- 
al bearing.  Their  solution  and  advocacy 
by  the  newspaper  was  simple,  direct,  and 
immediate.  Even  on  an  issue  like  slavery, 
simple,  direct,  moral,  sincere  men  like  Gree- 
ley and  Lincoln,  diametrically  differed,  and 
one-idead  men,  of  whom  Garrison  was  chief, 
with  the  noblest  purposes  and  the  highest 
ends  in  view,  did  far-reaching  harm  by  sow- 
ing bitterness  where  there  might  have  been 
planted  the  seeds  of  reconciliation,  evolu- 
tion, and  bloodless  advance.  Aside  from 
economic  causes  which  gave  new  value  to 
tobacco  and  cotton,  strengthening  slavery, 
and  differences  as  to  the  structure  of  fed- 
eral government,  these  attacks  from  the 
North,    where    gradual    emancipation    had 


PROFESSIONAL  TRAINING     141 

come  peacefully  and  without  imputing  moral 
guilt  to  the  slaveholder,  personally,  de- 
stroyed the  Southern  movement  for  gradual 
and  paid  emancipation,  strong  enough,  when 
Greeley,  Garrison,  and  other  like  Northern 
journalists  first  came  on  the  field,  twice  to 
carry,  for  the  gradual  extinction  of  slavery, 
the  popular  branch  of  the  legislature  of 
Virginia,  the  leading  State  of  the  South. 
These  Northern  journalists  were  matched 
by  Southern  journalists,  like  Rhett  and 
Yancey,  with  others  earlier.  Between  them 
any  hope  of  peaceful  adjustment  and  eman- 
cipation was  destroyed ;  not  wholly  by  these, 
but  on  both  sides,  journalists  were  the  ar- 
ticulate forces  which  bred  violence  from 
which,  at  the  eleventh  hour,  Greeley  shrank. 
The  political  leaders,  on  the  other  hand,  who 
were  trained  In  law  were  for  the  most  part 
seeking  constitutional  compromise  and  ad- 
justment which  would  end  slavery.  What 
might  not  adequate  training  have  done  for 
these  great  journalists  who.  In  ignorance, 
sowed  hate  whose  bitter  fruits  we  still  reap  ? 
These  men  argued,  differed,  and  tore  one 
another  when  the  financial,  economic,  consti- 
tutional, property-owning,  employment  rela- 


142         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

tions  of  our  social  system  were  relatively 
simple.  As  it  was,  mistakes  were  made  on 
both  sides.  Our  future  is  infinitely  more 
complex.  Property  and  human  rights  are  in- 
extricably mixed.  The  mere  phrase  "wage- 
slavery"  may  do  Infinite  evil  and  bring  con- 
flict instead  of  solution.  Issues  are  to  arise 
of  which  no  one  dreams.  About  one-tenth  of 
the  capital  of  the  railroads  of  the  United 
States,  as  represented  by  shares  and  bonds, 
is  owned  by  life-insurance  companies.  Rail- 
road securities  figure  also  in  the  assets  of 
savings-banks.  The  life-insurance  policies 
^gg'*sg3-te  $35,000,000,000  and  this  sum  is 
held  for  at  least  6,000,000  to  8,000,000  in- 
dividuals and  families.  Savings-banks  are 
the  trustees  of  an  even  larger  number. 
Railroad  workers,  for  the  most  part,  be- 
lieve they  were  never  fairly  paid  until  the 
United  States  Government  raised  their 
wages.  These  wages  have  been  reduced, 
with  public  approval,  by  the  railroad  man- 
agers, who  represent  the  owners  of  these 
shares  and  bonds.  The  farmers,  all  told  some 
11,000,000,  believe  the  charges  for  freight 
are  too  high.  With  the  rates,  as  they  are, 
the  railroads  are  in  grave  difhculties.     As 


PROFESSIONAL  TRAINING     143 

one  issue  after  another  arises  in  this  complex 
situation,  the  daily,  the  technical  weekly, 
the  farm  journal,  the  country  weekly,  by 
news,  head-lines,  and  editorials,  will  be  mak- 
ing and  expressing  opinion.  The  journals  of 
labor  unions  are  already  seeking  the  gradu- 
ates of  schools  of  journalism.  This  is  only 
one  of  many  similar  issues.  As  these  issues 
arise  and  are  tried  before  the  jur>'  of  the 
public,  training  is  needed  by  the  newspaper- 
man as  much  as  by  the  lawyer  in  the  court- 
room. Unless  the  newspaperman  is  trained 
to  this  work  by  the  mastery  of  fundamental 
social  and  economic  principles,  he  sounds 
the  trumpet  of  the  watchman  in  vain  on 
the  ramparts  of  the  future,  because  no  cer- 
tain sound  will  be  his. 

The  newspaper  man  cannot  be  too  much 
educated  for  tasks  like  these,  approaching, 
advancing,  imminent.  If  he  is  wise  he  will 
take,  not  the  two  or  three  years  of  college 
which  schools  of  journalism  prescribe;  but 
he  will  crowd  a  full  college  course  with  solid 
work.  He  will  know  neither  surcease  nor 
pause  through  his  professional  career  in  his 
effort  to  see  changes  as  they  come  and  scent 
the  battle  from  afar.     He  will  find  that  the 


144         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

means  of  reaching  the  public  are  constantly 
widening,  and  special  articles  reaching  mil- 
lions give  opportunities  unknown  to  the  edi- 
torial pages  of  the  past.  He  will  refuse  to 
be  bound  by  the  teaching  of  his  college  days 
and  the  years  of  professional  learning.  He 
will  meet  new  issues  with  new  knowledge, 
and  the  intricacy  of  our  social  system  by  a 
constant  and  unremitting  search  of  public 
records,  of  the  census,  of  financial  statistics, 
of  all  the  wealth  of  information  poured  out, 
now  that  shareholders  and  bondholders  are 
numbered  by  millions  and  over  one-half  of 
the  families  of  the  United  States  own  realty 
directly  or  indirectly. 

The  education  of  the  American  journalist 
is  never  finished.  He  who  watcheth  over 
the  Israel  of  democracy  can  neither  slumber 
nor  sleep. 


VIII 

PAY  AND  PECUNIARY  REWARD 

When  Sir  Henry  Irving  said  of  the  theatre 
that  it  must  succeed  as  a  business  or  it  could 
not  exist  as  an  art,  he  aptly  expressed  the 
condition  of  the  newspaper.  This  came 
with  its  beginning.  Through  the  seven- 
teenth and  eighteenth  centuries  the  news- 
paper was  poverty-stricken.  Some  news- 
papers made  money,  FrankHn's,  for  instance, 
but  he  had  to  eke  out  its  returns  by  acting 
as  postmaster,  running  a  job  office,  publish- 
ing books — most  of  them  a  loss  to  him — and 
getting  every  salary  and  stipend  that  came 
his  way.  At  the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth 
century  John  Walter,  a  printer  and  pub- 
lisher, put  the  London  Times  on  a  solvent 
basis.  Other  periodicals  made  money  for  a 
season.  This  is  the  only  one  which  had  a 
century  of  steady  profit,  until  it,  too,  ceased 
to  be  attractive  to  its  family  of  owners  who 
had  lived  on  it  through  four  generations  of 
its  long  gain.     No  newspaper  in  the  United 

145 


146         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

States  has  had  this  continuous  success.  The 
Chicago  Tribune  comes  nearer  to  this  record 
by  pubHc  report,  but  it  is  not  the  only  enter- 
prise of  its  owners.  Of  the  daihes  in  the 
other  cities  of  the  United  States,  there  are 
few,  if  any,  which  have  not  gone  on  the 
"red"  in  the  past  fifty  years,  so  far  as  their 
yearly  profit-and-loss  account  is  concerned. 
This  was  true  through  all  the  last  century. 
A  socio-political  economist  speaks  in  a  book 
of  a  happy  past  when  editors  owned  their 
newspapers  and  made  them  their  "avatars." 
He  instanced  Greeley,  Raymond,  Halsted,  no 
one  of  whom  owned  their  own  papers.  In 
the  list  he  gave  there  was  only  one  that  did. 
Greeley,  himself,  after  The  Tribune  was  ten 
years  old,  declared  that  a  solvent  newspaper 
could  not  be  run  in  New  York  unless  it  had 
official  advertising  and  the  favor  of  a  politi- 
cal party.  This  is  no  longer  true  in  New  York. 
It  was  very  nearly  true  of  the  first  James 
Gordon  Bennett  that  he  won,  independent 
of  these  aids;  but  The  Herald  in  time  ceased, 
with  other  dailies,  to  have  the  margin  of 
profit  needed  for  a  solvent  paper.  A  news- 
paper, like  a  theatre,  when  profitable,  is  a 
gold-mine,  but,  like  a  theatre,  when  public 


PAY  AND   REWARD  147 

support  departs,  the  loss  on  a  daily  is  sudden 
and  paralyzing.  This  is  true  of  the  whole 
range  of  periodicals.  The  monthly  has  not 
had  any  long  business  success  in  the  United 
States.  Few  have  survived  the  first  editor 
in  steady  profits.  The  weekly  has  been 
more  profitable  than  the  monthly,  on  the 
average,  taking  the  capital  involved,  but  no 
American  weekly  has  yet  outlasted  two  lives 
except  among  country  weeklies.  Some  of 
these  admirable  papers,  which  I  sometimes 
think  the  best  product  of  our  America,  re- 
flecting and  recording  the  sound  life  of  our 
American  countryside,  have  been  profitable 
for  three  lives,  but  there  are  not  many  of 
these,  possibly  only  four  or  five. 

National  weeklies,  by  which  is  meant  a 
weekly  with  a  general  circulation  over  the 
country,  have  so  far  had  a  precarious  career. 
Several  of  such  weeklies  in  New  York,  radi- 
cal or  conservative,  are  subsidized,  the  an- 
nual loss  being  met  by  wealthy  sympathizers. 
A  paying  public  they  do  not  represent. 
Robert  Bonner,  from  1844  to  1887,  made  the 
New  York  Ledger  highly  profitable,  but  the 
secret  of  its  success  died  with  him.  This 
span  of  years,  let  us  say,  from  1840  to  1890, 


148         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

was  the  period  of  the  weekly.  In  it  the  reli- 
gious weekly  rose,  flourished,  made  fortunes 
for  some  of  its  owners  comparable  to  those 
bequeathed  by  English  bishops  a  century 
ago.  Their  editors  often  ran  their  sheets 
like  militant  mediaeval  bishops.  The  week- 
lies remain;  their  old  profits  and  power  are 
gone.  This  success,  for  one  life  only,  has 
attended  literary  weeklies  in  this  country. 

The  United  States  has  never  produced  a 
critical  weekly,  like  the  London  AthencBiim, 
whose  profits  and  success  ran  on  for  eighty 
years,  or  The  Spectator,  whose  profits  have 
varied,  but  whose  position  has  been  main- 
tained approaching  a  century.  A  place  on 
such  weeklies  is  always  agreeable  and  often 
profitable ;  but  in  this  country  such  weeklies 
have  furnished  a  very  precarious  livelihood. 
The  two  classes  of  weeklies  here  offering  per- 
manent careers  are  country  weeklies,  already 
cited,  and  technical  journals.  These  last 
furnish  permanent  posts,  the  pay  is  as  high 
for  many  tasks  as  any  daily,  and  the  work  is 
absorbing  to  those  who  have  the  imagination 
to  feel  the  throb  and  thrill  of  finance,  of  pro- 
duction by  field  and  mine,  of  great  industries, 
of  agencies  for  transportation  or  wide-spread 


PAY  AND   REWARD  149 

distribution.  The  men  successful  in  these 
weekHes  are  almost  unknown  to  the  general 
public;  they  play  a  relatively  small  part  in 
affairs,  save  in  farming  weeklies,  but  when 
they  have  ability,  prophetic  accuracy — a 
very  rare  gift — and  vision,  they  exercise  a 
pontifical  influence  and  authority  for  vari- 
ous trades  and  industries  in  creating  stand- 
ards and  policies  within  the  fruitful  but 
specialized  field  they  till. 

Mr.  Bradford  Merrill,  a  journalist  of  the 
first  rank,  a  master  of  the  business  of  the 
newspaper  and  an  untiring  student  of  the  his- 
tory of  journalism,  writes  me  of  the  daily: 

When  the  New  York  Herald  was  founded, 
only  eighty-odd  years  ago,  there  were  six  morn- 
ing newspapers  in  New  York,  every  one  of 
which  has  since  died,  although  one  of  them,  The 
Sun,  still  shines  as  an  evening  paper.  In  the 
past  fifty  years  fifteen  or  sixteen  new  morning 
papers  have  been  born  in  New  York  City,  but 
all  have  died  except  six.  Of  these  papers  of 
general  circulation  (except  one  born  in  the  last 
two  years)  every  one  has  been  bankrupt  or  on 
the  verge  of  bankruptcy,  and  living  on  private 
loans  at  some  time  in  the  past  twenty-five 
years. 


150         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

This  experience  can  be  matched  in  every 
large  American  city.  Abundant  evidence 
exists  and  has  been  presented  in  court  that 
where  an  ordinary  sound  and  successful 
business  or  manufactory  is  worth  ten  or  fif- 
teen years'  purchase  on  its  profits,  a  news- 
paper is  not  worth  over  five. 

The  alternations  of  the  daily  from  profit 
to  loss  and  back  again  are  familiar  to  every 
newspaperman.  This  adds  to  the  precari- 
ous conditions  of  the  work  of  the  journalist, 
always  under  greater  risks  than  other  call- 
ings of  the  mind,  because  journalism  is  inter- 
linked with  business.  There  is  a  wide  gap 
between  the  steady,  continuous  impress  on 
the  public  made  by  a  man  holding  any  staff 
position  on  a  great  daily  and  the  most  bril- 
liant writer,  even  though  in  constant  de- 
mand. The  essence  of  the  work  of  the 
newspaper,  as  has  already  been  pointed  out, 
is  that  it  furnishes  a  continuous  audience  on 
a  scale  large  enough  to  be  a  sensible  and 
effective  factor  in  the  society  of  which  it  is 
a  part.  Unless  a  man  acts  through  this,  he 
is  without  the  greater  weight  and  influence 
of  the  journalist.  He  is  a  pamphleteer,  even 
if  his  organ  of  expression  is  a  weekly  of  40,- 


PAY  AND   REWARD  151 

000  circulation  or  so.  He  writes  for  and  Is 
read  by  a  selected,  non-political  group  and 
not  by  a  general  audience. 

This,  however,  Is  changing.  A  new  phase 
of  journalist  has  appeared,  who  practises  ap- 
plied journalism  as  he  might  law,  medicine, 
or  engineering.  Such  a  man  wins  vogue  for 
his  name.  He  is  known  to  a  wide  congrega- 
tion of  readers.  He  refuses  to  associate  him- 
self with  one  periodical,  daily  or  other.  He 
places  his  matter  as  he  writes  it,  and  he  gets 
orders  for  articles  as  lawyers  are  retained. 
Any  expert  man  who  makes  his  place  before 
the  public  early  finds  that  he  does  not  have 
to  send  his  articles  in  for  approval.  They 
are  ordered  and  paid  for  In  advance  of  pub- 
lication, a  far  more  agreeable  proceeding. 
Such  men  are  few.  For  some  reason,  not 
easily  explained,  they  wear  out  their  wel- 
come. Their  originality  becomes  exhausted. 
Most  of  them  finally  gravitate  to  a  perma- 
nent job.  Many  have  this  from  the  begin- 
ning. In  various  forms.  It  Is  a  necessary 
part  of  a  journalist's  continuous  work,  that 
he  gear  Into  a  permanent  relation  to  weekly 
or  daily.  Unless  he  has  this,  however  alive 
he  may  be  and  however  successful,  he  is  not 


152         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

in  real  touch  with  the  current  situation.  He 
misses  that  large  area  of  news  which  does 
not  get  printed.  As  Mr.  Dana  was  fond  of 
saying:  "We  only  get  half  the  news  and  we 
do  not  get  the  best  half." 

This  remains  true.  The  type  of  journal- 
ist I  have  been  describing,  in  the  past 
thirty-five  years  began  with  "syndicating" 
by  Allen  Thorndike  Rice  and  S.  S.  McClure 
in  the  middle  of  the  'eighties.  The  increase 
of  this  type  makes  it  at  least  possible  that 
the  periodical  world  of  a  generation  hence, 
let  us  say  of  i960,  will  be  made  up  of  two 
sets  of  newspaper  workers — the  men  who 
hold  regular  continuous  permanent  posts  on 
some  newspaper,  changing  from  one  to  an- 
other, and  the  men  and  women  who  have 
their  contracts  with  some  papers  and  their 
contributions  to  and  orders  from  others,  who 
carry  on  an  independent  existence.  One 
such  man  in  1918  made  $23,000,  though  still 
only  a  dozen  years  or  so  out  of  college.  A 
pretty  large  number  make  from  $5,000  to 
$10,000,  and  the  number  grows.  Women 
have,  on  the  whole,  succeeded  better  in  this 
task  than  in  staff  positions  on  daily  papers. 
This  is  in  part  because  the  world  is  not  ac- 


PAY  AND    REWARD  153 

customed  yet  to  women  in  command,  outside 
of  domestic  life.  This  is,  of  course,  non- 
sense. No  end  of  examples  exist  to  show 
the  executive  powers  of  women.  It  is  an 
outw^orn  superstition  which  leads  an  ofifice 
to  hesitate  to  make  the  best  reporter  in  the 
room — every  news  man  knows  cases  in  which 
this  is  a  woman — city  editor,  or  select  the 
keenest  executive  in  a  newspaper  organiza- 
tion for  managing  editor.  Few  women  edit 
news,  but  from  the  work  done  in  schools  of 
journalism  I  have  no  manner  of  doubt  that, 
ability  being  equal,  a  woman  would  hold 
down  a  sheet  of  manifold  on  a  news  desk  just 
as  well  as  any  man.  This  belated  restriction 
on  the  careers  of  women  and  the  circum- 
stance that  a  major  share  of  woman-stuff, 
always  widely  salable,  is  done  by  women, 
leads  many  of  them,  sooner  or  later,  to  the 
ranks  of  the  unattached.  Fashion,  "sob- 
lets,"  manners,  cooking,  and  advice  on  how 
to  make  over  an  old  dress  or  a  new  hus- 
band, these  subjects  know  not  politics,  cities, 
or  various  types  of  newspaper — like  the 
"comic"  daily  strip,  plain  or  colored,  these 
have  an  universal  appeal.  Very  possibly,  as 
the  differentiation  of  the  daily  goes  on,  the 


154         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

newspaper  will  be  more  and  more  a  forum 
for  many  voices  and  pens,  supplying  opinion 
and  information  on  all  topics  and  issues,  as 
each  attracts.  Selection  and  direction  will 
be  made  by  a  strong  selected  permanent 
staff.  The  general  news  will  be  standard- 
ized and  be  the  same,  substantially  alike,  in 
all  newspapers,  the  business  office  watching 
circulation  and  advertising.  There  is,  at 
present,  a  tendency  in  this  direction.  Just 
as  this  is  the  first  American  war  which  has 
not  furnished  a  general  who  became  Presi- 
dent, so  it  is  the  first  war  which  has  not 
thrown  up  a  conspicuous  American  corre- 
spondent whom  the  public  of  newspapermen 
recognized  as  the  war  correspondent  of  the 
day.  The  war  news  was  more  standardized 
than  ever  before.  City  news  associations  do 
what  individual  reporters  once  did  and  the 
reliance  on  association  news  of  various  kinds 
grows  in  all  the  various  fields.  Syndicates 
which  furnish  articles  to  many  newspapers, 
reaching  an  audience  numbered  by  millions, 
pay  high  prices  for  articles  by  well-known 
writers  and  to  the  well  known  who  cannot 
write. 

The  newspaperman  in  his  training  has, 


PAY   AND    REWARD  155 

therefore,  two  types  of  careers  before  him, 
though  for  seven  men  out  of  ten  fate  de- 
cides. Choice  is  not  within  their  power  or 
powers.  Those  who  have  Hberty  and  the 
personal  abihty  to  choose  vary  temperamen- 
tally. There  are  those  who  prefer  to  cross 
the  ocean  in  a  liner  with  everything  found, 
than  to  address  themselves  to  a  voyage  on 
a  single-hander.  The  gap  is  not  as  wide  as 
this,  but  this  comparison  illustrates  it.  On 
one  side  there  are  the  daily  risks,  a  sense  of 
personal  independence  and  reputation,  and 
the  freer  hand;  on  the  other,  organization,  a 
wider  horizon,  and  a  more  constant  income 
and  the  anonymous  life.  Large  prizes  are 
won  in  both.  Forty  years  ago  a  red-headed 
and  hopeful,  slender,  nervous,  and  much-be- 
freckled  young  man  told  me  in  Washington 
that  he  was  tired  of  the  news  game  and  pro- 
posed to  see  all  the  world  at  the  expense  of 
the  American  newspaper.  He  found  that  by 
economy,  many  stops,  and  that  cheerful 
readiness  to  take  anything  that  is  coming, 
which  goes  with  red  hair,  he  could  keep  mov- 
ing on  fifty  dollars  a  week.  He  began  with 
an  absurdly  small  grub-stake  and  started, 
selling  his   "stories,"    as    a    newspaperman 


156        THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

would  call  his  travel-letters,  at  five  dollars 
apiece.  Pretty  nearly  half  this  was  eaten 
up  by  the  "overhead."  He  kept  on.  You 
could  not  open  the  Sunday  papers  of  any 
city,  large  or  small,  without  finding  that  one 
of  them  had  his  account  of  strange  lands. 
He  worked  hard.  He  read.  He  carried  a 
weighty  load  of  books  and  reports  on  each 
trip,  and  he  knew  his  land  before  he  visited 
it.  In  time  he  had  a  competence.  His  let- 
ters gave  him  public  repute  as  a  geographer, 
and  he  issued  school  geographies  that  sold 
and  out  of  which  he  is  said  to  have  received 
$120,000.  A  woman  of  unusual  aptitude 
for  advice  to  women  has  had  for  a  number 
of  years  an  annual  income  of  $i  8,000.  Rich- 
ard Harding  Davis  went  to  the  Boer  War 
with  contracts  for  $22,000  a  year  from  Eng- 
lish and  American  papers.  He  would  get 
more  now.  As  the  war  wore  on  he  was  con- 
vinced the  Boer  cause  was  just,  and  he  threw 
up  his  contracts  and,  at  considerable  risk  of 
being  shot  as  a  spy,  crossed  over  to  the  Boer 
lines,  and  his  work  there  brought  him  a  bare 
fraction  of  what  he  was  receiving  from  the 
sheets  of  the  more  powerful  antagonist  whose 
cause  he  had  abandoned. 

Victrix  causa  placuit  Diis,  sed  victa  Catoni. 


PAY  AND   REWARD  157 

The  American  newspaper  was  never  able 
to  pay  living  salaries  to  its  staff  until  adver- 
tising began  on  a  large  scale,  half  a  century 
ago.  In  1 85 1  the  New  York  Tribune  divided 
the  morning-paper  field  w^ith  Bennett's  Her- 
ald, which  had  two  or  three  times  its  circula- 
tion and  business.  It  had  become  in  ten 
years,  since  it  was  founded,  the  leading  anti- 
slavery  daily  and  weekly  in  the  country. 
The  first  paid  nothing,  the  weekly,  before 
long  with  250,000  circulation,  was  profit- 
able. Horace  Greeley  was  the  foremost  fig- 
ure in  the  newspaper  fight  with  slavery. 
He  received  $50  a  week  in  1851,  when  The 
Tribune  was  ten  years  old  and  he  a  journal- 
ist twenty  years.  Snow,  the  advertising 
man,  had  $30;  Charles  A.  Dana,  the  manag- 
ing editor,  $25;  Bayard  Taylor,  correspon- 
dence, editorial,  and  special  articles,  $20; 
and  George  Ripley,  easily  one  of  the  five  best 
book  reviewers  the  American  press  has  pro- 
duced, $15.  Greeley  received,  in  addition 
from  dividends  on  his  shares,  $7,500  in  1850, 
and  in  1851  about  $10,000.  His  total  return 
was,  therefore,  at  the  cost  of  living,  as  large 
as  any  writing  man  for  twenty  years  after. 
He  owned  only  a  quarter  of  the  shares,  and 
until   he  died,  in   1872,  held  his  place  only 


158         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

through  the  support  of  other  shareholders. 
A  reporter  was  then  receiving  from  $5  to  $8 
a  week.  By  1875  a  reporter  just  beginning 
in  New  York  on  a  daily  was  paid  $15  a  week; 
in  two  or  three  years  he  might  expect  $25. 
A  city  editor  had  from  $40  to  $50  a  week,  a 
managing  editor  $75  upward  or  downward, 
and  an  editorial  writer  of  the  first  rank  was 
paid  $100  a  week.  A  dramatic  critic  re- 
ceived from  $40  to  $50,  but  many  of  the 
notices  were  written  by  men  paid  from  $15 
to  $20  a  week.  The  notices  in  the  New 
York  World  in  1876  of  Booth's  return  to  the 
New  York  stage,  when  he  performed  for  the 
first  and  only  time  "  Richard  II,"  were  writ- 
ten by  a  young  man  three  years  out  of  col- 
lege, who  was  paid  $20  a  week.  When  Ivory 
Chamberlain,  an  editorial  writer  of  the  first 
rank  in  his  calling,  went  on  the  New  York 
Herald  in  1876  to  do  six  editorial  articles  a 
week,  column  and  turn — the  younger  Ben- 
nett desiring  to  set  up  an  editorial  page — his 
pay  of  $15,000  a  year  was  commented  on  as 
phenomenal.  The  pay  of  writing  men  in 
other  American  cities  ran  20  to  30  per  cent 
below  those  in  New  York.  There  was  prob- 
ably no  editorial  writer  anywhere  who  re- 


PAY  AND    REWARD  159 

ceived  over  a  third  of  Mr.  Chamberlain's 
pay.  John  Hay  did  not.  The  largest  pay 
of  an  editorial  writer  at  present,  1921,  is  on 
weekly  pay  and  a  sliding  contract,  run- 
ning from  $200,000  to  $300,000  a  year,  all 
told. 

Through  the  'eighties  the  range  of  salaries 
over  the  United  States  remained  little 
changed,  though  an  advance  took  place 
in  Boston  and  Philadelphia.  At  the  close  of 
the  last  century  an  advance  came  slowly. 
Mr.  Arthur  Brisbane,  March  26,  1912,  pub- 
lished an  article,  contributed  to  the  Cornell 
Era,  in  which  he  said : 

Young  men  start,  as  a  rule,  on  a  salary  vary- 
ing from  $10  to  $15  a  week — on  newspapers  in 
large  cities.  The  salaries  that  are  paid  now  in 
newspaper  work  are  very  much  bigger  than 
they  were  a  few  years  ago.  They  run  as  high 
as  twenty-five  and  fifty  thousand  dollars  a  year 
for  employees.  Owners  of  newspapers  some- 
times make  as  much  as  a  million  a  year  and 
more  from  one  single  paper. 

Salaries  and  profits  are  still  higher  to-day. 
The  reporter  begins  in  New  York  at  from 
$20  to  $25  a  week,  if  he  comes  from  a  school 


i6o         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

of  journalism.  An  experienced  reporter  has 
$75  to  $100  a  week,  often  more.  A  city  edi- 
tor who  received  $7,500  a  year  in  191 2  when 
Mr.  Brisbane  wrote,  receives  twice  as  much 
now.  At  least  five  receive  this  sum  in  New 
York.  The  managing  editor  who  was  paid 
from  $10,000  to  $12,500  then,  receives  now 
from  $20,000  to  $30,000.  There  are  eight 
managing  editors,  three  in  New  York  City, 
nearer  $30,000  than  $20,000.  The  income 
of  one  managing  editor  ran  recently  to 
$40,000.  Three  managing  editors  in  New 
York  receive  from  $40,000  to  $50,000  a  year. 
Forty  years  ago  there  were  some  twenty  men 
on  New  York  papers  who  were  paid  $100  a 
week  and  over.  To-day  a  club  of  upward 
of  200  members  could  be  gathered  of  men 
on  the  daily  and  technical  press  of  New 
York  who  receive  $10,000  a  year  and  more. 
Among  the  rank  and  file,  salaries  of  $60  to 
$80  a  week  are  frequent. 

Salaries  like  these  are  paid  nowhere  else. 
In  Chicago,  Boston,  and  Philadelphia  re- 
porters are  still  beginning  at  $12,  $15,  and 
$20  a  week.  Men  editing  news  receive  $40 
a  week.  A  city  editor  twice  or  three  times 
this.     Editorial  writers  have  not  gone  much 


PAY   AND    REWARD  i6i 

above  $ioo,  which  were  paid  in  these  cities 
twenty  years  ago.  Managing  editors  re- 
ceive $150  to  $300  a  week.  The  salaries  in 
lesser  cities  are  small.  They  are  not  much 
above  the  salaries  of  thirty  years  ago  in  New 
York.  In  other  cities,  like  Buffalo,  Minne- 
apolis, St.  Paul,  St.  Louis,  Kansas  City,  and 
San  Francisco,  the  men  at  the  top  are  paid 
as  much  as  in  larger  cities,  and  the  beginner 
and  the  men  at  the  bottom  less.  The  poor- 
est return  to  newspapermen  are  in  cities 
under  100,000  population.  Papers  are  few. 
There  is  no  bid  for  men  between  the  dailies, 
but  much  competition  between  the  men. 
The  narrow  horizon  must  be  met  by  courage, 
thrift,  study.  Reporters'  salaries  are  deplor- 
ably small.  Some  improvement  has  been 
secured  in  Boston,  Rochester,  Scranton,  and 
other  cities  after  organizing  unions  affiliated 
with  the  American  Federation  of  Labor. 
This  gave  the  writing  force  the  support 
of  the  mechanical  departments  in  their 
demands,  a  very  effective  alliance.  In 
Rochester  after  the  pay  of  writers  was 
brought  to  a  level  with  wages  in  the  me- 
chanical field,  the  union  dissolved.  In  Aus- 
tralia and  New  Zealand,  newspaper  writers 


1 62         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

have  been  organized  for  a  decade.  Salaries 
have  been  advanced,  security  of  tenure 
gained,  and  hours  reduced.  The  general 
standard  of  work  has  not  suffered.  In  a 
number  of  newspaper  offices  In  this  country 
the  average  salary  of  the  composing-room 
and  the  pressroom  Is  larger  than  the  average 
In  the  writing  force.  These  things  ought 
not  so  to  be.        ^ 

Relative  incomes  in  other  callings  and  in 
journalism  In  our  larger  cities  range  about 
as  follows,  taking  the  leading  men.  The 
successful  lawyer  gathers  the  largest  pro- 
fessional Income.  The  specialist  in  medi- 
cine comes  next.  The  large  corporation 
manager  will  rank  with  these  men,  but  there 
are  fewer  large  returns  of  $150,000  and  up- 
ward, and  more  managers  on  $30,000  to 
$50,000.  The  architect  varies  much  be- 
tween different  years,  but  a  run  of  $30,000 
to  $50,000  a  year  Is  gained  only  by  leading 
men.  At  this  place  the  journalist  comes 
with  a  few  above  $20,000,  with  executive 
men  at  $30,000  to  $50,000  a  year,  and  very, 
very  few  higher.  In  cities  of  500,000  or 
more  there  are  cases  of  clergymen  whose  sal- 
aries and  fees  together  run  close  to  and  some- 


PAY  AND    REWARD  163 

times  exceed  the  best-paid  salaried  news- 
papermen in  the  place. 

In  considering  the  pecuniary  rewards  of 
the  new^spaperman  there  must  be  considered 
both  the  relatively  low  return  for  equal  abili- 
ties and  the  hazards  of  financial  risks  in  the 
newspaper.  The  foundering  of  a  newspaper 
in  any  city  or  its  consolidation  with  a  rival 
is  like  a  wreck.  The  younger  men,  under 
thirty-five,  acquire  new  posts  with  little 
difficulty,  but  older  men,  holding  specialized 
posts  after  many  years  of  service  on  one 
newspaper,  often  find  themselves  in  very 
serious  straits.  There  is  no  calling  in  which 
it  is  more  necessary  for  the  young  man  to 
insure  his  life  early,  at  the  very  start,  and  to 
save  systematically,  steadily,  and  inexora- 
bly. If  he  does,  he  can,  judging  from  the 
number  of  cases  I  have  known,  find  himself 
at  the  end  from  $30,000  to  $50,000  ahead 
of  the  game.  This  is  no  large  sum,  but  it  is 
a  mighty  comfortable  proposition  when  the 
years  begin  to  slope.  There  are  instances  of 
larger  estates  left  by  working  journalists, 
reaching  $250,000,  but  these  are  rare  with 
men  not  owmers. 

If  pay  be  low,  hours  are  long  in  a  journal- 


i64         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

ist's  day.  The  morning  newspaperman  will 
have  many  years  in  which  he  does  not  leave 
his  office  until  from  12  to  2  A.  m.  These 
hours  were  once  even  later.  A  day  of  ten 
or  twelve  hours  will  be  no  unusual  thing  for 
him,  often  the  rule  for  weeks  together.  The 
evening  newspaperman  has  to  begin  earlier 
and  bear  the  heavy  burden  of  the  early  riser. 
The  afternoon  daily  has,  too,  that  awful 
task,  the  "lobster  watch,"  which  begins  at 
midnight,  is  occupied  in  diligently  conning 
and  collating  the  morning  papers  until  its 
luckless  holder  leaves  the  office  between  8 
or  10  A.  M.,  as  the  rest  of  the  staff  arrive. 

These  hours  entail  much  self-denial.  They 
render  any  social  life  very  difficult,  but 
this  troubles  few  working  newspapermen. 
There  is  the  terrible  legend  of  the  luckless 
night  editor  who,  going  home  at  gray  dawn, 
was  never  seen  by  his  children  except  when 
they  awoke  and  he  was  in  his  pajamas,  ready 
to  go  to  bed.  While  they  were  asleep  he 
went  to  his  work.  They  wholly  refused  to 
recognize  him  when  they  met  him  in  the  ordi- 
nary garb  of  a  citizen  by  day.  Unless  a 
journalist  marries  a  woman  who  adopts  his 
newspaper  hours,  as  the  writer  is  glad  and 
grateful  to  record  has  been  his  supreme  good 


PAY  AND   REWARD  165 

fortune,  there  will  be  an  inevitable  conflict 
between  the  household  and  the  professional 
day.  The  strain  on  health  in  the  hours, 
the  exigencies,  and  the  nervous  wear  and 
tear  of  a  calling  which  has  its  daily  crisis  in 
"going  to  press,"  calls  for  physical  strength, 
a  sound  constitution,  and  constant  care  for 
health,  and  here  again  the  newspaperman's 
future  will  depend  on  the  skill  with  which 
he  is  fed  and  protected  from  interruption  in 
his  sleep  at  his  home. 

These  various  causes  bring  it  about  that 
those  who  drop  out  in  journalism  are  very 
numerous.  Perhaps  no  larger  than  in  law, 
but  far  more,  I  think,  than  in  the  ministry, 
in  medicine,  or  architecture.  It  is  true  of  all 
our  professional  schools  that  a  very  much 
larger  share  cease  to  practise  the  calling 
for  which  they  are  trained  than  the  public 
realizes.  Possibly  professional  schools  do 
not  sufficiently  exclude  men  unfit  for  the 
calling.  The  "mortality"  in  the  course  of 
preparation  is  largest  in  medicine,  and  it  has 
the  most  rigorous  schooling.  All  profes- 
sional schools  pass  men  about  whose  profes- 
sional future  they  are  in  doubt.  Nor  are 
these  always  the  men  who  fail. 

The  wraith  which  stands  in  the  way  for  all 


i66         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

who  practise  the  arts  of  expression  is  the 
short  period  in  which  men  are  at  their  best. 
In  medicine  the  end  comes  first  for  the  sur- 
geon. Wise  lawyers  avoid  this  fate  by 
drawing  young  men  into  their  firms.  Unless 
this  is  done,  as  Richard  H.  Dana's  biography 
shows,  clients  begin  to  dry  up  as  sixty  is 
passed.  Architects  cease  as  years  go  to  meet 
immediate  and  current  taste.  Landscape- 
painters  are  in  an  art  revolutionized  every 
thirty  years.  The  portrait-painter  and  the 
statuary  last  longer.  The  "dead-line  of  50" 
is  familiar  in  the  clergy.  The  journalist 
loses  his  capacity  in  like  fashion  and  for  a 
like  reason.  The  speaker,  the  actor,  the 
painter,  the  writer,  the  journalist  enter  ac- 
tive life  with  a  larger  number  abreast  of 
their  way  of  seeing  and  depicting,  on  the 
onward  march,  than  will  keep  step  with 
them  again.  As  this  host  diminishes  and 
new  ranks  appear  in  the  rear,  the  message  of 
those  older  finds  fewer  who  know  its  mean- 
ing. But  Mr.  Arthur  Brisbane  has  put  this 
conditioning  fact  better  than  any  one  else. 
He  at  least  has  escaped  this  peril.  I  first 
saw  him  thirty-nine  years  ago  in  the  New 
York  Sun  office,  a  slender  youth  with  a  face 


PAY  AND    REWARD  167 

of  high  power  and  pallor,  and  Mr.  Chester 
G.  Lord,  the  best  judge  of  the  young  writer 
I  have  ever  known,  pointed  him  out  to  me 
as  the  ablest  young  man  that  had  ever  en- 
tered The  Sun  office.  In  the  years  since, 
those  of  his  craft  know  how  he  has  kept 
up  his  reading,  worked  at  every  new  subject, 
multiplied  his  contact  with  men,  and  seen 
each  new  cause  from  afar.  His  style  is  a 
m-odel  of  the  way  to  reach  the  vast  mass. 
In  the  article  from  which  I  have  already 
quoted  he  says: 

And  in  the  newspaper  business  there  exist  a 
condition  and  a  danger  unknown  in  other  work. 
That  should  be  thought  of  carefully  by  young 
men  that  contemplate  newspaper  work. 

The  newspaperman  becomes  less  valuable  nine 
times  out  of  ten  as  he  becomes  more  familiar 
with  his  work — and  for  this  reason. 

The  value  of  a  newspaper  writer — reporter, 
editorial  writer,  or  whatever — depends  upon  the 
strong  impression  that  events  make  upon  him, 
and  upon  his  ability  to  express  that  impression 
in  what  he  writes. 

The  longer  the  ordinary  man  continues  to  see 
the  less  he  feels. 

In  the  ordinary  lines  of  work  diminished  emo- 
tion is  not  a  detriment,  but  rather  a  help. 


i68         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

A  young  doctor  for  the  first  time  amputates 
a  leg  and  suffers  torments — his  impressions  are 
vivid. 

Ten  years  later  he  cuts  off  a  leg  with  no  emo- 
tion, doing  his  work  carefully  and  perhaps 
thinking  of  the  golf  game  in  the  afternoon. 
He  cuts  the  leg  off  or  opens  up  the  human  body 
with  no  emotion  at  all — and  he  is  a  better 

DOCTOR     THAN     IN     THE     DAYS     WHEN     HE     FELT 
EMOTION. 

The  young  reporter  sees  his  first  "electrocu- 
tion," describes  his  first  great  labor  strike  or 
fire,  is  deeply  impressed,  feels  strongly,  and 
writes  "a  good  story." 

Ten  years  later,  in  nine  cases  out  of  ten,  he 
is  like  the  doctor  cutting  off  the  leg.  He  feels 
nothing — and  then  he  is  no  longer  a  good  news- 
paperman. For  no  man  can  really  pretend  to 
feel  when  he  doesn't.  He  may  not  see  the  dif- 
ference, and  his  editor  may  not  see  the  differ- 
ence— but  the  man  who  reads  the  newspaper 
will  see  the  difference  at  once. 

Another  difference  with  the  newspaper  writer 
is  this: 

He  must  make  his  reputation  fresh  every 
day.  The  lawyer  of  fifty  lives  perhaps  on 
work  that  he  did  at  thirty;  the  work  that 
brought  him  clients  whom  he  still  keeps. 

And    the    doctor    at    fifty    lives    on    patients 


PAY  AND    REWARD  169 

whom  he  gathered  about  him  in  his  youth  and 
vigor. 

Not  so  the  newspaperman.  If  he  cannot  do 
TO-DAY  what  he  did  ten  years  ago  or  twenty 
years  ago  he  is  not  wanted  to-day. 

The  newspaperman  in  that  respect  is  even 
more  unfortunate  than  the  actor.  For  if  the 
actor  loses  his  power,  if  the  singer  loses  his 
voice,  the  public  will  still  hear  with  pleasure 
an  old  favorite,  and  the  advertising  of  the 
name  has  value.  Not  so  with  the  newspaper- 
man. When  he  can  no  longer  act  or  sing — in 
his  line  of  work — his  day  is  done. 

•  •••••  •• 

However,  newspaper  work  is  the  best  work — 
since  the  greatest  thing  that  a  man  can  do  is  to 
deal  with  millions  of  others.  Newspaper  power 
is  the  greatest  power,  for  it  is  the  power  that 
shapes  and  directs  the  thoughts  of  men.  And 
there  is  no  power  but  thought. 

Newspaper  work,  though  it  may  not  lead  to 
great  newspaper  success  or  great  financial  re- 
ward, is  a  most  useful  school  of  experience. 

The  young  man  who  goes  to  work  as  a  re- 
porter— and  that  is  the  only  way  to  begin — 
who  observes,  takes  care  of  himself,  keeps  out 
of  temptation  and  all  fonns  of  nonsense,  is 
attending  a  real  life  college  of  the  highest  pos- 
sible value. 


I70         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

Those  who  best  escape  this  peril  are  men 
who  possess  the  unusual  but  still  not  infre- 
quent combination  of  business  capacity  and 
the  gift  of  journalism:  the  shrewd  ability  of 
the  profit  maker  and  the  penetration  of  the 
newspaperman  as  to  the  news  that  is  wanted 
and  the  opinion  which  expresses  current 
needs  and  the  demand  and  duty  of  the  hour. 
Journalism  offers  to  such  opportunities  both 
for  fortune  and  for  influence  as  long  as  a 
man  keeps  himself  from  holding  any  politi- 
cal office  or  entering  "politics,"  the  constant 
temptation  and  snare  spread  before  such 
men.  Joseph  Pulitzer  was  a  crowning  ex- 
ample of  this  combination.  As  Rodin  said, 
when  he  modelled  the  bust  of  Joseph  Pulit- 
zer, a  replica  of  which  stands  in  the  School 
of  Journalism  of  Columbia  University,  which 
he  endowed,  he  found  himself  modelling  a 
man  with  two  sides  to  his  face,  one  a  busi- 
ness American  and  the  other  the  prophet 
and  poet.  When  Joseph  Pulitzer  bought 
the  New  York  World,  May  lo,  1883,  it  had 
made  no  profits  for  nine  years.  In  six  years 
it  returned  a  "profit -and -loss -account" 
profit  of  $1,018,000.  Meanwhile  meeting 
out  of  the  profits  the  sum  required  for  its 


PAY  AND    REWARD  171 

purchase,  $400,000.  To  an  amazing  power 
of  creating  circulation  and  putting  a  business 
on  a  profitable  basis  within  a  year,  Mr. 
Pulitzer  added  the  political  sagacity  which 
led  him  to  print  a  platform  of  ten  planks,  all 
of  which  have  been  adopted  and  none  of 
which  seemed  then  likely  to  command  a 
majority  in  the  United  States.  What  was 
then  both  a  new  declaration,  a  political  prin- 
ciple, or  a  prophecy  has  now  come  to  be 
accepted  by  every  one  in  substance,  if  not 
in  detail.  Such  instances  are  rare  and,  least 
of  all,  in  a  metropolitan  newspaper.  James 
Gordon  Bennett  had  this  specific  combina- 
tion of  business  and  journalism.  It  is  pos- 
sessed in  an  eminent  degree  by  Mr.  Adolph 
S.  Ochs,  of  the  New  York  Times,  and  has 
been  exercised  by  him  w^ith  constant  refer- 
ence to  public  duty. 

The  country  weekly  furnishes  many  men 
who  have  this  unusual  combination,  because 
the  business  problems,  while  much  harder 
than  they  seem,  are  less  difificult  than  the 
financial  responsibilities  of  a  great  newspa- 
per. Every  State  in  the  Union  has  a  little 
group  of  men,  not  much  known  to  the  gen- 
eral public,  who  edit  its  country  newspapers 


172         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

and  make  out  of  the  work  a  fair  income,  and 
exert  a  political  influence  in  the  town  and 
county  in  which  they  live,  and  often  over 
their  own  State,  far  greater  than  is  usually 
held  by  the  publisher  or  editor  of  a  daily, 
large  or  small,  in  a  city.  Very  few  forms  of 
success  are  more  tangible  and  more  agree- 
able than  that  of  an  editor  of  a  country 
weekly  who  has  these  twin  abilities,  and  has 
achieved  the  success  just  outlined.  The 
possible  profits  of  a  man  who  has  this  com- 
bination of  powers,  in  a  greater  or  less  de- 
gree, increases  and  increases  with  great 
rapidity  as  the  circulation  of  the  paper  is 
large  and  its  business  issues  correspondingly 
weighty. 

As  has  already  been  pointed  out,  a  metro- 
politan daily  in  a  large  city  generally  suffers 
in  circulation,  advertising,  and  influence  if 
its  head  takes  a  political  post,  whether  elec- 
tive or  appointed.  There  are  exceptions, 
but  they  are  few.  The  editor  or  proprietor 
of  a  daily  in  a  smaller  city,  let  us  say  of 
250,000  population  or  less,  on  the  other 
hand,  often  improves  his  position  before  the 
public  and  the  influence  of  his  paper  by 
taking   public   office.     Senator   Gilbert    M. 


PAY  AND   REWARD  173 

Hitchcock,  of  the  Omaha  World-IIerald,  is 
one  of  the  most  useful  members  of  the  Senate 
to  which  he  has  been  elected  by  a  Repub- 
lican State,  though  himself  a  Democrat. 
His  newspaper  has  steadily  gained  in  cir- 
culation and  profit  during  his  successful 
political  career.  President  Harding  is  a 
still  more  notable  instance  of  an  editor  at 
the  head  of  a  daily  in  a  city  of  28,000  reach- 
ing the  highest  position  open  to  an  Ameri- 
can. Nor  was  any  journalist  who  knew 
the  Marion,  O.,  Star  unaware  of  his  ability. 
The  Democratic  candidate  in  1920,  Gov- 
ernor Cox,  was  also  a  newspaperman.  The 
country-weekly  editor  is  pretty  constantly 
in  politics.  Editors  in  elective  and  public 
posts  are  more  numerous  now  than  a  gen- 
eration ago. 

The  newspaperman  who  wants  a  political 
career  should  early  turn  to  the  weekly  or 
small  daily.  He  may  not  succeed,  but  he  is 
almost  certain  to  fail  if  he  seeks  political 
preferment  on  the  big  daily  of  our  great 
cities.  The  best  public  service  of  a  news- 
paperman comes  by  keeping  out  of  politics 
in  all  the  fields  of  journalism.  If  he  does, 
be  his  field  large  or  small,  he  will  suggest 


174        THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

legislation  and  see  it  pass,  expose  abuses  and 
force  their  reform,  modify  public  policy, 
prevent  poor  nominations,  defeat  unfit  men, 
and  promote  sound  selections.  No  news- 
paper can  always  accomplish  these  ends. 
Elections  do  not  follow  circulation.  News- 
paper influence  is  not  like  the  registry  of  a 
pressure  gauge,  moving  with  every  change. 
It  is  a  constant,  continuous  work  whose 
harvest  may  be  delayed,  but  which  in  time 
changes  the  public  current.  Public  men  are 
constantly  expressing  their  disregard  of  the 
newspaper  in  public,  but  every  newspaper- 
man knows  their  anxiety  to  be  reported, 
their  apprehension  at  newspaper  attack, 
their  fear  of  opposition  to  a  candidate,  and 
their  dread  of  exposures. 

The  complete  control  of  a  newspaper  by 
one  man  is  only  possible  where  the  man  him- 
self is  able  both  to  manage  the  newspaper 
as  a  business  and  to  write  himself  upon  its 
editorial  page,  or  has  the  still  more  unusual 
gift  of  outlining  an  editorial  policy,  and  per- 
suading other  men  to  express  it  successfully, 
without  any  sense  of  loss  of  individual  power 
on  their  part.  Where  the  publisher  cannot 
write  or  the  editor  cannot  publish  there  is 


PAY   AND    REWARD  175 

certain  to  be  a  divided  field  of  authority, 
and  relations  between  the  two  men  are  ex- 
tremely likely  to  be  the  mutual  decision  of 
two  partners,  strong  on  one  side  of  the  busi- 
ness, but  quite  unequipped  on  the  other. 

Another  combination  of  various  talents, 
new  and  almost  as  profitable,  is  presented  by 
the  newspaper  artist  with  a  gift  for  humor 
and  the  capacity  to  dramatize  picture  and 
text  in  the  old  familiar  channel  of  folk-lore. 
"Mutt  and  Jeff"  are  our  old  friends  Don 
Quixote  and  Sancho  Panza.  "Foxy  Grand- 
pa" is  the  "myth  of  the  old  man"  which  has 
so  long  ruled  society,  and  to  which  Mr. 
H.  G.  Wells  so  strongly  objects.  Various  in- 
fant prodigies  who  make  game  of  age,  au- 
thority, and  an  array  of  elderly  enemies  are 
but  "Jack  the  Giant-Killer."  Nell  Brinkley 
is  a  newspaper  Watteau.  The  capacity  to 
do  this  in  effective  caricature  and  catchy 
phrases,  in  flowing  lines  and  happy  sugges- 
tion, pays  better,  just  at  present,  than 
the  American  presidency.  One  such  genius 
climbed  in  three  short  years  from  $15  a  week 
to  $50,000  a  year,  with  movie  rights  to  fol- 
low. A  syndicate  nearly  always  handles  this 
combination    of    art,    dialogue,    love,    and 


176        THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

laughter,  supplying  sketches  and  writings  to 
seventy  or  eighty  newspapers.  The  appe- 
tite for  folk-lore  being  just  as  strong  as  at 
the  dawn  of  the  race,  those  who  do  this  work 
are  not  only  better  known  to  the  mass  than 
any  other  names  in  our  dailies,  but  a  num- 
ber have  guarantees  of  $50,000  a  year  under 
long  contracts,  and  two  or  three  earn  over 
$100,000  a  year  on  salary. 

The  ballad-maker  once  had  nothing  but 
cakes  and  ale,  but  the  newspapei  poet  whose 
verse  appears  daily  receives  $30,000  or  more 
a  year.  A  butt  of  malmsey  Madeira  (com- 
muted now  to  £60  or  £70  a  year)  is  all  the 
British  crown  pays  its  poet  laureate,  but 
democracy  has  larger  and  more  tangible  re- 
wards for  the  verse-maker  who  catches  its 
fancy  and  holds  its  attention. 

Of  all  the  workers  on  the  newspaper  these 
gifts  are  the  most  unique  and  inexplicable. 
They  meet  a  living  human  need  not  slaked 
by  the  conventions  of  art,  and  no  training 
has  yet  been  found  either  to  develop  or  dis- 
cover them.  Colored  supplements  are  often 
called  demoralizing;  but  who  can  hold  an 
ethical  brief  for  Grimm's  Tales  or  the  morals 
of  many  a  fairy-story  ? 


IX 
THE  COMPETITION  OF  "PUBLICITY" 

The  newspaper  has  been  able  to  go  on 
through  all  the  last  century  paying  the  small- 
est salaries  for  the  same  ability  because 
there  was  no  other  demand  for  the  writing 
man.  Books  are  few  and  pay  little  or  noth- 
ing. The  United  States,  with  all  its  millions 
of  population,  yearly  produces  two-thirds  as 
many  books  as  England,  half  of  those  sent 
out  in  Italy,  one-third  of  those  written  in 
Germany,  about  as  many  as  small  lands  like 
Holland,  Denmark,  all  in  the  years  before 
the  war. 

Not  a  tenth  of  the  books  published  pay 
the  writer  more  than  board  wages.  The 
same  book  has  brought  a  profit  in  Germany 
when  it  had  been  a  loss  here  to  the  author. 

The  man  who  wrote  could  not  get  even 
low  pay,  except  from  the  daily  and  weekly. 
After  he  had  published  a  third  of  his  books, 
Mr.  Howells  told  me  he  believed  all  the  men 
who  earned  $5,000  a  year  from  books  could 

177 


1/8         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

be  seated  at  a  dinner-party  of  eight.  Frank 
Stockton  wrote  me  in  1886,  after  he  had  pub- 
lished The  Lady  or  the  Tiger,  and  his  best 
output,  that  $125  I  sent  him  as  managing 
editor  of  the  Philadelphia  Press  for  a  syndi- 
cated story  was  the  best  price  he  had  ever 
received.  From  $1,000  to  $3,000  is  now 
paid  for  short  stories,  but  not  often.  Ad- 
vertising furnishes  at  present  two-thirds  the 
revenue  of  daily  papers  and  half  the  revenue 
of  weeklies  and  monthlies.  A  generation 
ago  the  circulation  furnished  two-thirds  the 
revenue  and  advertising  one-third.  This 
increase  in  advertising  in  periodicals,  which 
began  after  our  Civil  War,  was  followed 
thirty  years  ago  by  a  great  flood  of  cir- 
culars, pamphlets,  posters,  and  every  phase 
of  publicity  outside  of  the  periodical.  There 
are  9,000,000  people  who  own  automobiles, 
which  means  that  they  were  equal  to  a 
single  payment  of  from  $700  to  $12,000. 
There  were  even  ten  years  ago  only  about 
400,000  people  buying  bonds  and  shares. 
There  are  now  about  5,000,000  and 
12,000,000  more  who  bought  them  in  the 
war. 

This  market  has  not  been  served  by  the 


"PUBLICITY"  179 

newspaper.  By  their  failure  to  censor  finan- 
cial advertising,  the  newspapers  injured  the 
value  of  their  advertising  columns.  They 
would  have  been  wiser  if,  instead  of  oppos- 
ing, they  had  demanded,  the  passage  of  laws 
requiring  the  scrutiny  by  a  State  authority 
of  every  advertisement  of  a  dubious  security. 
The  financial  institutions  found  that  they 
must  reach  customers  by  more  direct  chan- 
nels than  the  newspaper.  Railroads  and  in- 
dustrials found  that  they  must  put  their  case 
before  the  public.  "House  organs"  were 
needed  in  every  corporation  employing  men 
by  the  thousand.  Employers  discovered 
that  "morale"  is  as  important  in  transporta- 
tion lines,  insurance  companies,  department 
stores,  mines,  and  factories  as  in  an  army. 
When  the  Federal  Reserve  Bank  was  organ- 
ized it  had  to  have  a  periodical  to  reach  all 
the  banks.  The  larger  banks  found  that 
they  could  keep  their  depositors  only  by  in- 
teresting them  in  banks.  The  little  business 
price  circulars  of  the  past  have  been  fol- 
lowed by  costly  magazines  and  books  on 
financial  subjects,  many  of  them  most  use- 
ful as  books  of  reference.  Writers  were 
needed    for    this   work,   trained   newspaper 


i8o         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

men.  The  salaries  in  this  work  are  two  to 
three  times  as  large  as  in  regular  newspaper 
work  of  the  same  writing  grade,  the  hours 
and  the  tasks  are  less  onerous,  and  the  posi- 
tions more  permanent. 

Able  newspapermen  are  being  drawn  off 
into  this  new  calling  exactly  as  the  abler 
lawyers  of  our  day  are  drawn  Into  the  service 
of  corporations ;  but  exactly  as  such  lawyers 
often  find,  though  not  invariably,  that  their 
service  of  corporations  shuts  the  door  to 
all  political  ambition,  so  the  newspaperman 
who  enters  this  service  loses  his  weight  In 
affairs.  It  is  no  longer  possible,  as  It  was  up 
to  about  fifty  years  ago,  to  draw  great  law- 
yers, like  Webster,  Choate,  Tilden,  and  Ev- 
arts,  Into  the  service  of  the  commonwealth. 
Ye  cannot  serve  two  masters.  The  news- 
paperman goes  through  the  same  change 
when  he  enters  "publicity."  He  doubles 
and  trebles  his  Income,  but  his  magazine  arti- 
cles are  turned  down  by  the  monthlies  and 
weeklies.  His  special  articles  are  rejected 
by  the  Sunday  supplement  editors.  His 
name  is  put  on  the  list  of  those  whose  every 
contribution  goes  to  the  newspaper's  adver- 
tising manager  to  make  certain  that  there  Is 


"PUBLICITY"  i8i 

no  free  advertising  concealed  in  it.  He  has 
lost  all  the  joy  and  the  pulsing  thrill  of  serv- 
ing the  many  and  the  coming  cause.  These 
are  gone,  never  to  return.  He  has,  to  use  a 
familiar  experience,  lost  his  "amateur  stand- 
ing," as  the  college  man  loses  it  by  taking 
pay  for  "summer  baseball." 

The  work  of  publicity  is  honorable  and  of 
good  report.  It  has  enlisted  the  zeal  and 
enthusiasm  of  some  of  the  best  newspaper- 
men now  living.  It  is  a  necessary  and  use- 
ful task.  It  has  its  high-minded  code,  just 
as  advertising  has.  There  are  few  more  im- 
pressive, more  useful,  and  more  energetic 
ethical  reforms  than  that  which  has  come 
in  the  last  twenty  years,  both  in  advertising 
and  in  publicity.  There  is  this  difference 
between  them,  that  the  advertising  agent  is 
paying  for  the  space  he  secures.  The  pub- 
licity man  is  sometimes  paying  for  space, 
though  this  in  large  establishments  is  prop- 
erly the  task  of  another  office,  the  advertis- 
ing manager.  The  publicity  man,  represent- 
ing any  establishment,  bank,  trust  company, 
railroad,  "industrial,"  factory,  college,  uni- 
versity or  school,  church  or  philanthropy, 
has  in  charge  an  institution  which  produces 


i82         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

"news"  useful  and  of  interest  to  the  public, 
an  event  legitimate  for  publication.  This 
"news"  it  is  the  task  of  the  publicity  man 
to  put  in  such  shape  that  a  newspaper  will 
want  to  print  it  as  news.  A  large  part  of 
the  news,  particularly  that  relating  to  organ- 
izations of  all  orders,  is  a  duplex.  On  one 
side  it  will  benefit  the  entity  represented ;  on 
the  other  it  is  of  interest  to  the  public.  If 
it  is  handled  so  that  the  latter  comes  to  the 
front  its  chance  of  being  admitted  to  the 
newspaper  is  greatly  enhanced ;  if  the  former, 
it  will  be  shut  out  as  subject-matter  for  the 
advertising  department  of  a  newspaper.  In 
addition,  the  publicity  man  puts  such  an 
event  in  a  shape  which  will  appeal  to  the 
friends  and  customers  of  the  institution,  in- 
creasing the  one  and  multiplying  the  other. 
The  last  is,  of  course,  the  open  and  direct 
course.  As  to  the  former,  the  newspaper  is 
watchful.  For  that  large  share  of  human 
activities,  religious,  charitable,  and  educa- 
tional, which  our  American  system  exempts 
from  taxation  as  does  no  European  fisc,  the 
American  newspapers  give  a  generous  space, 
far  beyond  that  habitual  in  England  and 
Continental   Europe.     Outside   of   this  the 


"PUBLICITY"  183 

newspaper  is  watchful  and  grows  more  alert 
every  year.  A  bureau  existed  for  several 
years,  watching  this  field  and  notifying  news- 
papers of  an  approaching  demand.  This  did 
its  work  in  educating  the  newspaper-ofifiice, 
and  was  discontinued. 

The  publicity  man  addresses  himself  to 
his  work  in  the  spirit  of  a  lawyer,  counsel 
for  a  corporation.  Exactly  as  at  the  bar 
complaint  is  justly  made  that  the  weight  and 
ability  of  the  legal  profession  serves  cor- 
porations, so  publicity  is  diverting  from  the 
newspaper  the  ability  of  journalism.  When 
the  full  tide  of  activities,  dulled  now  in  1921, 
was  in  progress  in  1919  and  1920,  there  was 
hardly  a  week  but  saw  some  conspicuously 
able  newspaperman  turn  to  publicity,  just 
as  able  lawyers  entered  corporate  service. 
In  some  cities  leading  members  of  the  bar 
receive  annually  a  retaining  fee,  whose  ag- 
gregate in  the  case  of  one  conspicuous  ex- 
ample in  Philadelphia  in  the  recent  past  ran 
to  $200,000,  whose  real  purpose  was  to  pre- 
vent this  particular  counsellor  at  law  from 
appearing  against  the  corporations  paying 
this  dubious  tribute. 

The  doubt  with  which  this  practice  was 


1 84        THE  NEWSPAPERMAN 

regarded  by  high-minded  lawyers  is  closely 
analogous  to  the  feeling  in  the  calling  of 
journalism  that  a  man  who  enters  on  pub- 
licity devotes  to  personal  ends  ability  which 
should  serve  public  interests  and  public  in- 
terests alone.  The  personal  standard  and 
conscience  of  men  alike  honorable  will  differ 
on  an  ethical  issue  like  this.  Those  who 
take  up  publicity  will  find  the  world's  ap- 
proval and  enjoy  a  prosperous  professional 
life;  but  those  who,  when  offered  by  some 
great  corporation  the  opportunity  to  serve 
it,  have  declined  and  prefer  to  preserve  the 
repute  won  by  years  of  endeavor,  that  they 
hold  an  unpaid  brief  for  every  good  cause 
and  will  not  pitch  their  camp  among  the 
prosperous  tents  and  traffickers  of  Kedar, 
will  be  happy  and  poor. 

For  publicity  all  the  training  of  the  jour- 
nalist is  wanted,  and  a  plentiful  measure  of 
character  and  address.  There  needs  to  be 
special  attention  and  study  paid  to  economic 
issues,  transactions,  events,  and  statistics. 
The  same  careful  study  of  the  psychology  of 
attention  needs  to  be  made  as  advertising 
demands.  The  special  gift,  not  frequent,  of 
being  accurate  and  interesting  on  subjects 


"PUBLICITY"  185 

which  bore  most  people  is  needed.  It  can 
be  cultivated,  but  it,  like  the  news  sense,  is 
a  special  equipment.  If  it  is  absent  nothing 
can  supply  it.  Brought  in  daily  contact 
with  financiers  and  financial  affairs,  the  pub- 
licity man  has  unusual  opportunities  and 
openings  to  add  to  his  personal  fortune  and, 
if  he  so  desires,  to  be  selected  for  some  im- 
portant executive  position  in  a  financial  in- 
stitution. This  precise  phase  of  the  work  of 
the  journalist  is  recent,  not  over  twenty-five 
years  old.  There  is  a  wide  difference  from 
the  rather  shabby,  uncertain,  and  secretive 
man  who,  forty  years  ago,  represented  in 
newspaper-offices  the  great  corporations,  and 
the  publicity  man  to-day,  known,  accepted, 
and  acceptable,  and  having  a  weight,  force, 
and  position  of  his  own.  The  development 
of  the  publicity  man  has  greatly  diminished 
and  will  end  the  sinister  rumors  that  at- 
tended in  the  past  the  old  type  of  corpora- 
tion representatives  in  newspaper-offices. 
As  a  railroad  lawyer  said   forty-five  years 

ago  at  Albany:  ''That  is  all  left  to " 

(naming  the  leading  Albany  lobbyist  of 
forty-five  years  ago);  "I  am  only  here  to 
diffuse  an  atmosphere  of  good  feeling." 


i86         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

The  "publicity  man"  needs  in  these  days 
a  college  education  and  the  training  of  a 
school  of  journalism  whose  graduates  in  all 
the  various  institutions  that  have  such 
schools  are  turning  to  this  work  in  depress- 
ing numbers.  He  has  to  have  newspaper  ex- 
perience and  a  wide  newspaper  acquaintance. 
His  personal  repute,  professional  standing, 
and  the  confidence  he  enjoys  among  news- 
papermen must  be  high.  The  man  most 
successful  has  had  the  training  of  the  city 
room,  held  executive  positions  which  make 
journalists  known  to  their  calling,  and  shared 
in  gathering  either  political  or  financial  news, 
or,  better  still,  both.  He  must  know  public 
men.  He  must  have  an  unerring  instinct  as 
to  what  should  be  left  out  and  what  a  news 
or  city  editor  will  use.  The  publicity  man 
is  changing  the  reserve  of  bankers  and  the 
attitude  of  business  men  to  newspapers 
quicker  than  any  other  agency  for  two  gen- 
erations. He  has  turned  the  mere  propa- 
ganda of  the  past  into  an  honorable  service 
to  society,  with  the  inevitable  loss  to  himself 
already  mentioned. 

The  newspaper,  which  is  straitened  be- 
tween the  hazards  of  its  business  and  the 


"PUBLICITY"  187 

steady  and  successful  pressure  of  printers 
and  pressmen  for  higher  wages,  will  be 
forced  to  raise  the  pay  of  the  writing  man  in 
order  to  keep  experienced  men  of  ability  and 
to  attract  younger  men  of  promise. 

In  journalism  and  publicity  aliice,  there 
are  special  pitfalls  which  go  with  the  calling, 
as  in  all  occupations  and  vocations.  Ano- 
nymity tempts  to  careless  utterance  and 
record,  sometimes  injurious  to  others,  which 
would  not  come  over  a  signature;  but  this, 
too,  tempts  to  hitting  harder  than  is  meet, 
from  sheer  pride  in  the  personal  word.  To 
overcome  these,  the  judicial  mind  and  an 
inner  responsibility  are  needed.  The  jour- 
nalist is  not  tempted  to  invent,  but  he 
risks  inaccuracy  so  near  is  swift  oblivion  to 
his  work.  Sensitive  professional  honor  is 
demanded  here.  Renan  said  the  only  temp- 
tation from  the  truth  that  overcame  him 
was  a  happy  phrase.  Avoid  it !  Personal 
ends,  offers,  and  profit  tempt.  As  for  the 
financial  writer  to  speculate  on  his  early 
news.  This  is  fatal  for  all  in  journalism  or 
publicity.  No  one  should  enter  this  public 
service  unless  he  honestly  feels  he  can  resist 
these  temptations. 


X 

DIFFERING  AIMS  AND  TASKS 

The  newspaper  presents  itself  to  many 
who  seek  its  tasks  as  the  path  to  various 
aims — book  reviewing,  dramatic,  musical,  or 
art  criticism,  foreign  correspondence,  writing 
special  articles,  fiction,  and  general  litera- 
ture. They  want  to  write;  men  on  news- 
papers write ;  the  conclusion  seems  inevitable 
that  the  newspaper  is  the  place  for  them. 

So  far  as  fiction  is  concerned — and  this  is 
also  true  of  the  playwright — the  chief,  per- 
haps the  sole,  advantage  of  the  newspaper  is 
that  reporting  gives  contact  with  a  wide 
range  of  life.  This  is  particularly  true  of 
women.  They  are,  in  spite  of  their  partial 
enfranchisement,  much  hedged  about.  They 
reach  the  twenties  and  even  the  thirties  sin- 
gularly, often  incredibly,  ignorant.  In  the 
past  a  conspiracy  of  silence  has  hedged  them 
about,  not  yet  fully  cut  away.  Training  for 
the  newspaper  and  still  more  the  city  room 
and  the  reporter's  life  gives  them  more  ex- 

i88 


AIMS  AND   TASKS  189 

perience  to  the  hour  than  any  other  work. 
Genius  does  not  need  this.  When  George 
Meredith  was  asked  how  much  he  had  him- 
self seen  of  "Our  Conquerors,"  he  said, 
"Once,  at  dinner,"  and  went  on  to  say,  in 
substance,  that  with  this  a  man  equal  to  the 
task  could  draw  the  portrait;  he  needed  no 
more.  But  I  am  not  writing  for  genius. 
The  average  writer  needs  experience,  squan- 
ders it  at  the  beginning,  runs  dry  and 
wheezes. 

For  the  average  writer  the  newspaper  will 
give  experience  in  abundant  measure.  Not 
merely  the  under  side  and  the  seamy  edge  of 
society,  but  the  whole  range.  Much  more 
is  needed.  The  best  fiction  is  only  produced 
by  intensive  study.  "The  Cup"  had  two 
years  of  solid  study,  and  Robert  Browning 
gave  rabbinical  lore  twelve  years'  study  to 
give  the  world  "Rabbi  Ben  Ezra"  and  the 
rest.  With  George  Eliot's  study  for  Romola 
every  one  is  familiar.  Whitman  was  avid  of 
knowledge,  and  altered  his  reference  to  the 
sperm-whale  cow  after  a  talk  with  a  Long 
Island  whaler. 

For  those  who  enter  the  newspaper-office, 
not  seeking  a  permanent  task,  but  in  order 


190         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

to    provide    themselves   with    the    material 
needed  in  fiction,  and  to  give  their  capacity 
for  expression  the  special  and  unique  train- 
ing furnished  by  the  newspaper-office,  there 
exists  the  same  necessity   for  the   mastery 
of  fundamental  studies.      A  generation  and 
more  ago  a  father  brought  his  son  to  a  news- 
paperman in  Philadelphia  for  advice  as  to 
his  training  for  literature.    When  he  finished 
his  preparatory  school  he  had  that  flare  for 
engineering  which  seized  so  many.     He  had 
pursued  his  studies  in  one  of  the  best  tech- 
nical   schools    in    the    United    States.     He 
could  not  bear  to  go  on  with  the  work  of  the 
engineer.     It  had  been  agreed  by  father  and 
son  that  the  case  should  be  submitted   to 
a  newspaperman,  with   critical   experience. 
He  surprised  both  by  advising  two  years,  if 
possible,  one  year  as  a  minimum,  at  Johns 
Hopkins  University,  in  political  science  and 
political  economy,  with  history  added,  then 
four  or  five  years  of  work  as  a  reporter. 
Both    accepted    the    advice.     He    went    to 
Johns  Hopkins.     He  entered  the  Philadel- 
phia Press  office.     He  found  there  the  sub- 
ject of  his  best-known  short  story,  Galleghcr, 
and  in  five  years  he  was  launched  in  the  sea 


AIMS   AND   TASKS  191 

of  letters.  Ten  years  later  he  was  asked  by 
the  newspaperman  who  had  given  this  ad- 
vice whether  it  had  proved  wise.  "  But  for 
those  semesters  at  Johns  Hopkins,"  he  said 
with  enthusiasm,  "I  should  have  had  no 
foundation,  no  solid  ground,  on  which  to 
build  my  fiction.  WTien  one  situation  and 
another  came  I  knew  how  to  handle  it  so  as 
to  produce  the  effect  of  reality,  because  I 
knew  what  the  original  thing  was."  Years 
passed,  the  newspaperman  was  selected  as 
the  first  director  of  the  School  of  Journalism, 
endowed  by  Joseph  Pulitzer.  The  morning 
the  announcements  of  his  selection  appeared 
in  the  papers  he  was  handed  this  telegram: 

Your  first  student  in  Journalism  congratulates 
the  Pulitzer  School  on  your  selection  as  its  Di- 
rector.    Richard  Harding  Davis. 

For  real  literature  I  doubt  if  a  newspaper 
does  anything.  Fiction  is  only  a  sort  of 
stepdaughter  of  letters.  You  can  count  on 
the  fingers  of  one  hand  all  the  novels  still 
generally  read  after  three  hundred  years. 
Don  Quixote,  Robinson  Crusoe,  The  Arabian 
Nights,  and  the  folk-tales  of  each  race  last. 


192         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

What  else?  Verse  and  drama  of  a  high 
order,  prose  which  lives,  and  how  little  of 
that  there  is !  Work  on  a  newspaper  is 
likely  to  do  harm  in  letters  by  squandering 
the  early  precious  years  of  production  that 
return  not.  Walt  Whitman  is,  it  seems  to 
me,  the  only  American  newspaperman  who 
has  produced  a  work  of  the  first  order.  The 
newspaper  and  periodical  undoubtedly  gave 
him  contact  and  material  as  to  the  city,  but 
he  used  it  because  he  was  a  divine  tramp 
and  not  because  he  was  a  good  newspaper- 
man. Who  the  truly  great  of  the  nineteenth 
century  are  we  do  not  yet  know,  but  the 
candidates  thus  far  are  none  of  them  news- 
papermen. 

Criticism  of  the  theatre,  music,  books,  and 
art  in  the  newspaper  attract  many  because 
they  are  interested  in  the  subjects,  have  a 
yearning  to  express  a  personal  opinion  on 
them  and  "lead  the  public"  taste,  and  cher- 
ish the  desire  to  come  in  closer  contact  with 
artists  in  their  fields.  This  may  come,  but 
not  along  the  paths  they  propose  or  foresee. 
The  newspaper  deals  with  these  subjects, 
not  because  they  are  part  of  "art,"  but  be- 
cause they  furnish  events  which  insist  on 


AIMS  AND   TASKS  193 

occurring,  plays,  concerts,  exhibitions,  sales, 
and  so  on.  These  have  to  be  reported,  and 
a  report  must  first  be  accurate  and  next 
informed.  No  one  is  trusted  at  a  big  party 
convention  unless  he  knows  politics,  has  a 
wide  and  personal  familiarity  and  acquain- 
tance with  the  principal  figures,  and  can 
place  what  is  said  and  done  in  its  proper 
relation  with  the  general  stream  of  political 
events,  past,  present,  and  to  come.  Less 
effort  is  made  to  secure  this  in  the  drama, 
music,  book  reviews,  and  the  arts,  because 
the  American  public  is  nothing  like  as  in- 
terested in  these  as  in  politics,  which  is  ill 
for  the  arts  and  good  for  the  State.  There 
are  Latin  communities  in  which  the  reverse 
is  true,  with  reverse  results. 

The  rawest  reporter  sent  to  these  events 
does  something  to  fit  himself,  if  it  is  no  more 
than  to  note  the  spelling  of  the  actor's  name, 
so  as  not  to  get  it  "Southern "  when  it  should 
be  "Sothern,"  It  is  recognized,  also,  that  a 
man  has  to  write  more  skilfully  on  these 
topics  than  on  a  straightaway  argument. 
Temperament  is  also  needed.  What  long 
since  took  place,  therefore,  is  that  there  is  a 
constant  natural  selection  in  progress  in  a 


194         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

newspaper-office  by  which  certain  men  who 
come  to  have  charge  of  these  fields  generally 
work  into  them,  according  to  the  aptitude, 
the  training,  and  the  natural  capacity  and 
judgment  of  each.  Public  interest  is  strong- 
est in  the  stage  and  next  in  succession  in 
music,  in  painting  and  sculpture,  and  last  in 
books.  Fiction  leads  here  in  American  pub- 
lic interest,  and  for  serious  works  there  is  a 
lesser  outlay  and  a  smaller  interest. 

Any  man  or  woman  of  the  necessary  re- 
quirements, "adequately"  trained  in  jour- 
nalism, or  under  present  conditions  merely 
getting  a  place  in  the  city  room,  who  has  a 
genuine  interest  in  these  arts,  and  provides 
himself  with  the  necessary  equipment,  will 
find  himself  writing  notices,  but  the  equip- 
ment must  be  broad  and  fundamental. 
More  hopeless  despair  I  have  not  often  seen 
in  a  writer  than  on  the  face  of  a  young  Har- 
vard graduate  who  early  in  his  college  course 
was  promised  a  chance  at  book  reviewing 
on  an  evening  paper  which  gave  consider- 
able space  to  book  reviews,  and  was  on  the 
list  of  an  uncommonly  good  list  of  publish- 
ers. As  he  was  to  write,  he  took  writing 
courses  in  college  and  "specialized  in  Eng- 


AIMS  AND   TASKS  195 

llsh."  He  avoided  all  the  sciences,  he  cut 
out  economics  as  "dull,"  and  history  as  a 
"beastly  grind,"  not  following  the  course  of 
the  student  who  took  all  the  history  and  lit- 
erary courses  he  could  find  in  the  same  cen- 
tury, "because  it  made  the  dates  easier." 
My  young  friend  was  able,  sincere,  with  a 
good  mind  and  a  turn  for  critical  expression. 
He  found  that  four-fifths  of  the  books  he 
had  to  review  dealt  with  science,  affairs,  and 
the  usual  range  of  the  day's  publications. 
For  verse  and  fiction  he  was  ready,  but  out- 
side of  that  his  college  courses  gave  him  no 
background. 

Fortune  and  accident  play  their  share  in 
the  selection  of  newspaper  critics,  but  any 
man,  once  on  a  newspaper,  who  wants  a 
task  which  does  not  carry  as  far  or  lead  to 
as  much  as  political  and  financial  journalism 
or  the  management  and  presentation  of 
news  will  be  writing  on  the  art  in  which  he 
is  interested  if  he  studies  it,  reads  on  it, 
pushes  his  acquaintance,  and  sedulously  fol- 
lows its  criticism.  If  it  is  music,  he  will 
take  courses  in  the  theory  and  history  of 
music.  He  will  add  to  this,  constant  and 
painstaking  study  of  scores.     He  will  learn 


196         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

the  lives  as  well  as  the  works  of  composers, 
the  records  of  musicians,  the  sequence  of 
programmes,  and  keep  notes  of  time  and 
interpretation.  He  will  not  despise  the 
graphaphone.  Our  musical  criticism,  led  by 
Mr.  H.  E.  Krehbiel,  ranks  higher  than  any 
other.  There  are  dramatic  critics  who  read 
and  reread  a  play  of  Shakespeare,  how- 
ever often  they  have  heard  other  interpre- 
tations, when  a  new  production  appears. 
Careful  critics  will  seek  the  original  of 
any  play  "adapted"  for  the  stage  in  Eng- 
lish, and  when  a  notable  artist  appears 
from  abroad  go  over  foreign  criticism  on 
his  past  performances.  Much  newspaper 
criticism  is,  it  is  true,  haphazard  impres- 
sion; much  on  the  stage  deserves  little  more; 
but  the  critic  who  respects  his  task  and 
himself  will  spare  no  labor.  His  work  will 
show  it,  and  he  will  gain  a  respect  and  at- 
tention not  paid  to  those  who  cleverly  record 
the  personal  reaction  to  each  performance. 
The  true  critic  will  read  plays,  the  lives  of 
players,  and  keep  track  of  criticism  in  Eng- 
land, France,  and  Germany.  He  will  give 
hours  to  preparation  for  a  new  performance 
of  a  Shakespeare  play  or  the  "Sunken  Bell." 


AIMS  AND  TASKS  197 

He  will  try  to  know  what  the  artist  wants 
to  do  as  well  as  what  he  does  do.  He  will 
watch  the  audience  and  he  will  report  its 
opinion  as  carefully  as  his  own.  He  will  see 
every  picture  that  is  available,  read  endlessly 
the  history  of  art,  keep  his  notes  of  past  ex- 
hibitions, and  refresh  and  review  from  them 
the  past  work  of  an  artist  as  he  passes  from 
stage  to  stage.  Above  all,  he  will  remem- 
ber that  art  is  living,  and  he  will  not  make 
the  mistake  of  insisting  that  there  was  jam 
yesterday  on  the  stage  and  will  be  to- 
morrow, but  that  one  need  not  expect  any 
to-day,  not  while  he  is  writing  criticism. 
But  all  this  will  not  do  the  job  on  the  daily, 
unless  the  critic  is  also  interesting. 

This  sense  of  criticism  needs  to  be  bal- 
lasted by  the  reading  of  the  best  criticism 
now  and  in  the  past  to  avoid  the  easy  task 
of  being  flip.  All  this  applies  to  the  review 
of  books,  save  that  here  a  wider  knowledge 
is  needed.  In  few  paths  is  the  temptation 
so  strong  to  be  easy  and  praise,  because  this 
is  all  the  publishers  ever  print  in  their  cir- 
culars and  their  newspaper  advertising,  and 
critics  love  to  be  quoted  and  see  their  names 
in  advertisements.     Reviewing  is  ill  paid ;  in 


198         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

proportion  to  the  time  it  takes  and  its  labor, 
about  half  the  other  work  of  the  newspaper. 
It  cannot  be  done  adequately  without  a 
constant  effort  to  keep  abreast  with  the 
progress  of  science,  art,  discovery,  theory, 
and  practice  in  the  leading  fields  of  human 
action.  The  good  and  thorough  reviewer 
need  have  no  fear  of  publisher  or  dread  of 
the  advertising  manager,  except  to  give 
prompt  attention  to  books  advertised,  as  is 
right.  A  reader  who  has  his  attention  drawn 
to  a  title  justly  expects  to  know  what  the 
book  is  like.  I  have  never  but  once  known 
of  a  publisher  who  threatened  to  withdraw 
his  advertising,  and  this  for  a  just  review, 
as  held  by  a  group  of  experts;  but  its  truth- 
telling  ran  across  the  personal  preferences 
of  an  autocratic  English  manager. 

The  promotion  of  men  to  the  editorial  j 
page  nearly  always  comes  by  selection  from 
the  news,  city,  and  critical  staff,  but  where 
there  are  scores  of  men  who  can  report,  do 
Sunday  specials,  and  write  criticism  there 
will  not  often  be  one  who  can  turn  out  edi- 
torials, effective  and  acceptable.  The  ex- 
periment is  constantly  being  made,  particu- 
larly by  publishers,  of  bringing  in  able  men 


AIMS  AND   TASKS  199 

in  literature  or  affairs  to  write  editorials,  but 
almost  invariably  with  failure.  The  life  of 
the  news  getter,  and  experience  in  and  about 
legislatures  and  conventions,  State  or  fed- 
eral, are  needed  to  develop  the  editor  after 
he  has  had  all  a  city  room  can  give  him. 
He  needs  an  embracing  sympathy,  a  howling 
joy  in  a  fight,  courage  and  the  will  to  take 
large  responsibilities  and  risks  as  large  with 
his  own  place  after  midnight.  "Nobody 
ever  reads  editorials"  is  often  said,  but 
nothing  somehow  cuts  into  circulation  like 
a  blunder  in  an  editorial.  Vigor  and  force 
of  statement  is  the  hardest  of  all  gifts  to 
achieve,  and  it  cannot  be  imparted.  Many 
good  all-around  editorial  writers  fail  at  this 
point.  The  long  leader  is  to-day  ineffective. 
The  short  is  a  miracle  and  works  the  miracu- 
lous. A  single  phrase  in  a  Sun  editorial 
killed  Hancock  as  a  presidential  candidate; 
Napoleon  said  of  Coleridge's  editorials  that 
they  were  worth  an  army  corps  to  England ; 
and  Manton  Marble  checked  wanton  arrests 
in  the  Civil  War  by  an  editorial  in  The 
World.  There  is  probably  no  post  on  a 
newspaper  so  often  and  so  long  waiting  for 
the  right  man  as  on  its  editorial  page. 


200         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

Successful  editorial  writers  have  almost 
without  exception  begun  their  training  early. 
They  are  always  voluminous  readers,  and 
while  they  have  neglected  much  in  college, 
books  they  have  not  neglected.  Endlessly 
do  they  read  newspapers  and  must  be  soaked 
in  newspapers  from  college  and  high  school. 
The  forensic  instinct  must  be  strong.  The 
affairs  of  all  countries  must  interest.  As  for 
the  great  game  of  politics  and  of  legislation, 
of  reform  and  exposure,  this  must  be  like  a 
religion.  Judgment,  exact  knowledge  of  in- 
tricate situations,  the  ability  to  absorb  hint, 
suggestion,  and  illumination  from  those  di- 
recting great  affairs,  and  the  knowledge  of 
what  must  be  left  out — these  only  come  with 
experience  and  contact  with  many  men  of 
many  minds.  Now  that  women  are  in  ac- 
tive touch  with  all  that  counts,  a  new  edi- 
torial problem  is  present,  but  for  some  rea- 
son for  which  I  have  no  explanation  I  have 
never  known  of  a  woman  that  wrote  good 
editorials,  save  on  social  studies,  though  I 
have  known  of  or  have  known  several  who 
wisely  guided  an  editorial  page.  There  must 
be  women  with  the  editorial  mind,  but  I  have 
never  known  one,  and  I  ask  no  larger  reward 


AIMS  AND   TASKS  201 

than  to  spur  some  young  woman,  reading 
these  Hnes,  triumphantly  to  prove  that  I  am 
wholly  wrong. 

The  casual  writing  of  the  college  news- 
paper does  nothing  like  so  much  to  prepare 
men  for  the  more  serious  tasks  of  a  daily  as 
hard,  conscientious  reading  in  history,  sci- 
ence, political  economy,  political  science, 
philosophy,  and  literature.  All  reading  is 
valuable;  this  reading  in  preparation  for 
newspaper  work  is  invaluable. 

Acquaintance  with  artists,  authors,  and 
actors  has  its  fruitage.  If  a  man  writes 
effective  criticism  such  acquaintance  comes 
spontaneously  and  naturally.  It  is  unwise 
to  seek  it  or  to  cultivate  it.  Unless  a  man 
has  carefully  equipped  himself  by  reading, 
study,  and  experience,  acquaintance  is  mis- 
leading. You  have  to  know  a  good  deal 
before  the  utterance  of  artist,  actor,  or 
author  can  tell  you  much.  A  course  in  a 
life  class  Is  worth  more  than  any  amount  of 
studio  talk  about  the  ideal  nude.  The  care- 
ful exhaustive  study  of  such  paintings  of  the 
past  as  our  galleries  hold  quicken  the  eye 
and  train  the  judgment  for  the  new  more 
than  can  artists. 


202         THE   NEWSPAPERMAN 

The  peril  of  the  young  critic  is  that  he  will 
see  fault  rather  than  achievement,  and  tell 
what  a  picture  play  or  presentation  is  not, 
instead  of  describing  and  interpreting  what 
it  is.  The  present  and  not  the  absent  is 
before  us  to  be  criticised.  It  is  easy  to  see 
deficiency;  it  is  difficult  to  see  and  weigh 
achievement.  The  path  to  recognition  of 
what  is  being  done  lies  in  the  study  of 

The  dead  but  sceptred  sovereigns  who  still  rule 
Our  spirits  from  their  urns. 

If  you  have  once  made  their  acquaintance 
you  are  fitted  to  recognize  the  real  thing 
when  it  crosses  your  path.  The  frequent 
peril  of  the  old  and  experienced  critic  is 
that,  unless  he  knows  the  development  of 
past  art,  he  will  not  recognize  the  develop- 
ment of  his  own  day  and  slam  the  door  of 
his  criticism  in  the  face  of  the  advancing 
future.  If  you  have  taken  the  trouble  to 
master  Byzantine  art  you  can  understand 
the  cubists.  If  you  know  from  your  own 
reading  what  a  fool  Jeffrey  made  of  him- 
self for  all  time  over  Wordsworth,  or  Vol- 
taire over  Shakespeare,  you  are  very  much 


AIMS  AND  TASKS  203 

less  likely  to  make  a  fool  of  yourself  over 
the  new  verse  of  to-day.  Whether  you  ap- 
prove or  not,  your  method  of  approach  and 
expression  will  be  different. 

The  earlier  in  his  life  the  future  critic 
begins  to  read  and  see  the  critics  and  the 
monuments  of  the  past,  in  all  the  arts,  the 
more  likely  he  is  to  get  a  chance  to  do  criti- 
cism and  the  longer  he  will  continue  to  write 
good  criticism. 

Lastly,  let  me  note  that  among  the  men 
who  do  effective  work  in  these  fields,  the 
proportion  of  those  who  have  kept  up  their 
Greek  and  Latin,  their  French  and  German, 
is  large,  larger  than  elsewhere. 


INDEX 


Ability  and  aptitude  for  journal- 
istic work,  5-8 

Advertiser,  Boston,  editorial  dic- 
tion changed  in,  108 

Advertising;  value  and  relation 
to  journalism,  178-180 

Arnold,  Matthew,  as  a  news- 
paper critic,  86 

Artists  and  cartoonists,  work  of, 

17s,  176 
AthencBum,     London,     place    in 

periodical  literature,  71,  148 
Authorship  and  journalism,  21, 

22,  74,  81-92 

Bennett,  James  Gordon,  busi- 
ness ability,  146,  171;  journal- 
istic vision,  79 

Bible,  The,  as  a  model  for  dic- 
tion, 95,  99,  102,  104, 10s,  112, 
140;  quoted  (Ezekiel),  32-34 

Blackwood's  Magazine,  place  in 
periodical  literature,  71 

Brisbane,  Arthur,  discusses  sal- 
aries, 159,  160;  as  newspaper- 
man, 166 

Brownell,  WilHam  Crary,  as 
city  editor  and  friend  of  the 
author,  127 

Browning,  Robert,  opinion  of 
periodical  pubUcation,  26-28; 
study  for  authorship,  189 

Calkins,  Hiram,  remarkable 
memory  for  names  and  faces, 
73,  74 


Calhng  to  newspaper  work,  the, 
16-18,  88,  89 

Carroll,  Lewis,  Alice  in  Wonder- 
land, enriches  EngUsh  lan- 
guage, 94 

Chamberlain,  Ivory,  large  salary 
of,  158 

CivU  and  Military  Gazette,  La- 
hore, example  of  world-wide 
journalism  in  English,  107 

Columbia  University  School  of 
Joumahsm,  124,  125,  170 

Commercial  Advertiser,  The  (N. 
Y.),  circulation  a  century  ago, 
121 

Comparison  of  journalism  with 
other  professions,  1-9,  41,  42, 
70,  166 

Comparison  of  newspaper  with 
other  periodicals,  70,  71 

Correspondents,  work  and  pay 

of,  154-156 

Criticism,  training  for  and  stand- 
ards of,  194-199,  202,  203 

Crome,  skill  as  craftsman  and 
painter,  83 

Dana,  Charles  A.,  his  news- 
paper EngUsh,  no,  in;  or- 
ganizes The  Sun,  122;  salary 
as  Tribune  editor,  157 

Davis,  Richard  Harding,  news- 
paper exfX-'rience  and  other 
training,  85,  190,  191;  war 
correspondent,  156 

de  Goncourt  and  criticism,  130 


205 


206 


INDEX 


De  Quincey  and  style,  139 
Dewey,   John,  as  teacher  and 

thinker,  93 
Dickens,  Charles,  as  newspaper- 
man, 85 
Difficulties    and    disadvantages 
of  journalistic  profession,  40, 
43,  44,  88,  89,  164,  i6s,  167- 
169,  187 
Divisions  of  newspaper  work,  8,9 
Dreiser,  Theodore,  as  newspaper- 
man, 85 

Editorial  writing,  192-200 
Eliot,  George,  study  for  Romola, 

189 
ElUs,    Dr.    William   T.,    syndi- 
cated Sunday-school  lessons, 

57 
English,  newspaper,  chapter  VI, 

93-113 
Equipment,  personal,  69-80 

Fiction-writers  aided  by  news- 
paper work,  84,  8s,  90 

Field  of  journalism,  4,  52-64, 
70,  71,  130,  131 

Franklin,  Benjamin,  saves  news- 
paper style,  108,  109 

Function  of  the  newspaper,  32, 
37,  38,  45 

Garrison,  editorial  opinions  of, 
140,  141 

Genghiz  Khan,  example  of  sol- 
dierly equipment,  69 

Gibbon,  newspaper  training  for 
history-writing,  86 

Gilder,  Richard  Watson,  names 
swift  readers,  76;  opinions  of 
poets,  82 

Government  and  the  press,  46, 
47,  52 

Greeley,  Horace,  early  training. 


122;  editorial  opinions,   140, 
141;  finance,  146,  157 
Growth  of  newspaper,  29,  30, 36, 
37,  121 

Hammond,  History  of  New  York, 
its  narrowness,  53 

Harden,  Maximilian,  style  of, 
108 

Harding,  President  Warren  G., 
as  a  successful  journalist,  173 

Harper's  Magazine,  place  in 
periodical  literature,  71 

Harrington,  H.  F.,  competence 
as  head  of  School  of  Journal- 
ism, Northwestern  University, 
128 

Health,  strain  upon,  71-73,  77 

Henry,  O.,  aided  by  journalism, 
87;  as  journaUst,  no 

Herald,  New  York,  profits,  146; 
salary  paid,  158 

History-writers  aided  by  news- 
paper work,  86 

Hitchcock,  Senator  Gilbert  M., 
journalistic  training,  173 

Howells,  William  Dean,  as  jour- 
naUst, 85;  opinions  of  literary 
pay,  177,  178 

Hurst,  Fanny,  newspaper  train- 
ing of,  8s 

Independent,  The,  place  in  peri- 
odical Uterature,  71 

Information,  value  of  general, 
10,  201,  203 

Irving,  Sir  Henry,  importance  of 
business  success  to  theatre, 
145 

James,  Henry,  lack  of  newspaper 

training,  8s 
Johns  Hopkins  University,   R. 

H.  Davis  attends,  190,  191 


INDEX 


207 


Johnson,  Samuel,  and  English 
style,  106,  io8,  109 

Keats,  John,  enriches  English 
language,  94 

Kipling,  Rudyard,  as  a  journal- 
ist, 8s 

Koran,  The,  contributions  to 
language  and  style,  95,  96,  98 

Krebhiel,  H.  E.,  dean  of  musical 
critics,  196 

Language,    traditions,    growth, 

and  development  of,  95-1 10 
Lincoln,      Abraham,      political 

opinions,  140 
Literature  and  journalism,   20, 

21-24;  chapter  V,  81-92;  191 
Lord,    Chester    G.,    judge    of 

young  writers,  167 

McCarthy,  Justin,  History  of 
Our  Own  Time,  shows  news- 
paper training,  86 

Macchiavelli,  The  Prince, 
preaches    distorted    doctrine, 

45 

McClure,  S.  S.,  as  newspaper- 
man, 152 

Meredith,  George,  as  news- 
paperman, 85;  genius  as 
writer,  189 

Merrill,  Bradford,  on  newspaper 
circulation  and  profit,  149 

Miller,  Hugh,  Schools  and  School- 
masters, on  degrading  one's 
talent,  82 

Missouri  University  has  first 
School  of  JournaUsm,  125 

Moral  responsibihty  of  journal- 
ist, 32-35,  38-39,  49-51 

Nation,  The,  place  in  periodical 
literature,  71 


National  attitudes  toward  jour- 
nalism, 14-16 

News  and  circulation  area,  12 

News  defined,  13 

News,  instinct  for  discovering, 
8,  10-12 

North  American  Review,  place  in 
periodical  literature,  71;  pub- 
lishes poets'  early  work,  90 

Northwestern  University,  School 
of  Journalism,  organized  by 
Chicago  Tribune,  128 

Ochs,  Adolph  S.,  joumaUst  and 

business  man,  171 
Origin  and  growth  of  newspaper, 

29,  30,  36,  37,  121 
Outlook,  The,  place  in  periodical 
literature,  71 

Pall  Mall  Gazette  publishes  Ar- 
nold's criticism,  86 

Patton,  ex-president  of  Prince- 
ton, opinions  of  religious  news, 
56 

Pay  for  newspaper  work,  152, 
156-163,  171,  175-178 

Personal  influence  on  the  press, 

51.  52,  174 

Poetry  and  the  press,  82-86,  89, 
90 

Poets,  newspaper,  176 

Political  leanings  of  a  news- 
paper,   47,    48,     50,    58-60, 

172-175 

Poole,  Ernest,  as  a  newspaper- 
man, 85 

Poor  Richard,  appears  first  in  a 
periodical,  87 

Power  of  the  press,  137,  138, 
140-143 

Press,  Philadelphia,  publishes 
Stockton,  178;  Davis  on,  190 

Professional  schools,  1 14-144 


208 


INDEX 


Profits  of  newspapers,  145-151 

Public  Ledger,  Philadelphia,  quo- 
tation to  illustrate  newspaper 
style,  93 

Publicity,  value  and  effect  of,  24, 
25.  42.  54-55;  chapter  IX, 
177-187 

Pulitzer,  Joseph,  enlarges  scope 
of  the  newspaper,  58,  59; 
great  reader,  77;  newspaper 
politics  and  profits,  170,  171; 
School  of  Journalism,  191 

QuaUfications  of  a  journalist,  1 1- 
14.  38,  57,  58  (see  also  Tech- 
nical training) 

Quarterly,  The,  place  in  periodi- 
cal Uterature,  71 

Reading,  a  newspaperman's,  75- 
78 

Reference  habit,  the,  78 

Religious  news,  55-58 

Review,  Edinburgh,  place  in  peri- 
odical literature,  71 

Rhett,  Southern  journalist  of 
Civil  War,  141 

Rice,  Allen  Thorndike,  as  news- 
paperman, 152 

Rice,  Grantland,  skill  of,  no 

Ripley,  George,  salary  of,  157 

Roosevelt,  Theodore,  rapid 
reader,  76;  use  of  newspaper 
in  pubUc  service,  etc.,  63,  64 

Saturday  Review,  The,  place  in 
periodical  literature,  71 

Schools  of  journalism,  1 17-144 

Service  of  newspaper  to  com- 
munity and  society,  19-21,  23, 
24, 32,  45  {see  Field  of  journal- 
ism) 

Shakespeare  as  model  of  style, 
140 


Shaw,  George  Bernard,  as  news- 
paperman, 83 

Sinclair,  Upton,  as  newspaper- 
man, 85 

Special  writer,  the,  64-66,  151 

Spectator,  The,  circulation,  121; 
place  in  periodical  literature, 
71;  profits,  148 

Status  of  the  journalist,  41 

Stockton,  Frank,  pay  for  story, 
178 

Strachey,  Lytton,  Queen  Vic- 
toria, shows  influence  of  news- 
paper training,  86 

Style  in  journaUsm,  9-1 1 

Sun,  The  New  York,  age,  149; 
Brisbane  and  Lord  on  staff, 
166,  167 ;  influence  illustrat- 
ed, 199;  organized  by  Dana, 
122;  publishes  O.  Henry,  87, 
no 

Syndicating,  value  of,  152 

Taylor,  Bayard,  salary  of,  157 

Technical  training  of  newspaper- 
man, 61-63,  I I 7-144.  194. 
195 

Thackeray,  William  Makepeace, 
as  newspaperman,  85 

Times,  London,  religious  news, 
60;  solvency  of,  145 

Times,  New  York,  work  of  Ochs 
on,  171 

Trade  journals,  service  of,  178- 
i8s 

Trades  unions  and  salaries,  161 

Tribune,  Chicago,  organizes 
School  of  Journalism,  128; 
success  of,  146 

Tribune,  New  York,  early  sal- 
aries paid,  157 

Truth  in  journaUsm,  49 

Typewriting,  use  in  newspaper 
work,  74,  75 


INDEX 


209 


Variations  of  newspaper  method 

and  ideal,  66-68 
Vision,  the  essential  gift  of,  7g,  80 
Vocabulary    of    newspaperman, 

93-113 

Walter,  John,  makes  London 
Times  pay,  145 

Watterson,  Henry,  skill  as  a 
reader,  77 

Wellington,  adherence  to  gov- 
enmient,  46 

Whitman,  Walt,  benefited  by 
leaving  newspaper  work,  82, 
83;  seeker  of  knowledge,  189 

Williams,  Dr.  Walter,  organizes 
School  of  Journalism  in  Uni- 
versity of  Missouri,  125 


Women  in  newspaper  work,  125, 

152,  153 
World,  The  New  York,  acquired 
by  Pulitzer,  58;  early  salaries 
paid,  158;  example  of  influ- 
ence, 199;  personal  relations 
of  author  on,  127;  profits 
under  Pulitzer,  170;  youth  of 
employees,  73 

Yancey,  Southern  journalist  of 

Civil  War,  141 
Youth  and  journaUstic  work,  5, 

73.  89 

Zola,  opinion  on  value  of  news- 
paper training  to  literary 
style,  85 


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